Friday, September 03, 2010

New Google Features Help PR Pros Keep Up With Growing Trends


Posted by Amanda Walsh

The Furia Rubel team wants to share some news about interesting search tools from Google with ThePRLawyer audience.

Google Realtime search allows you to look for results in Google as they are happening. The search compiles results from Twitter, Facebook, blog posts, and websites to give you real time content that is live and continuously updated. The user can also specify the location of where the news is coming from. For example, the keyword “Obama” can be narrowed down to view only the keywords produced from a specific city or state. Many times you can find breaking news before major news outlets have the opportunity to release them. This is a great marketing tool for any brand or business that wants to stay on top of breaking news or crisis communications.

Another feature from Google is the new YouTube Channel, the Google beat, which brings updates of the latest weekly trends in Google searches within the U.S. The video, formatted in a news-style way give a rundown of the latest search trends. For example, this week “Hurricane Earl” and “Paris Hilton” were two huge search terms.

These two new features from the search giant raise some interesting food for thought - Is Google trying to compete with Twitter in the department of trending topics? The popular micro-blogging service presents real-time updates of news from around the world and can be narrowed down by keyword.

It seems lately that Google is moving in the Twitter-based, newsfeed direction with their recent feature rollouts. The Google beat, YouTube channel, also brought to my attention other tools that Google offers such as Google Trends, Hot Trends, and Google Insights for Search. The Year-end Zeitgeist feature is the most interesting to me because it provides a snapshot of the year in search trends. All of these provide the user the ability to check out what is hot right now or what have been the top search trends over an entire year.

As technology and features from Google continue to grow, we continue to build archives of our culture. With an archive reaching back to 2001, anyone can see the gaining and declining trends of that year.

Again, searching trends and these new features from Google can be very useful for professionals in the marketing and public relations industry to keep an eye on the changing trends across the country.

(Photo credit: Google.com)

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