Recently, Google Trends added an update to the service and extended its functionality to websites with Google Trends for Websites. Google Trends gives recommendations on popular trends occurring on the web today. Now anyone with a website can find out popular trends about their website, except for the small guys.
Google Trends for Popular Websites
Google Trends for Websites is yet another traffic tracker for sites. It’s in a field already dominated by Compete, Quantcast (for US traffic), and Alexa. So what could it possibly offer to users that we don’t already have? This is Google we’re talking about and Google has a significant amount of data about a ton of websites. For example, in our recent poll of Instant Messengers that ReadWriteWeb readers use here’s how the websites IM clients Digsby, Trillian, Pidgin, Miranda IM, and Adium stack up against one another using Google Trends for Websites:
You’ll receive a graph of traffic stats along with stats on the region of most visitors, related sites that visitors visited, and even other search terms if there are any. In contrast, Google Trends for keywords will show related searches, how popular the keyword is, peak time, news articles and blog posts mentioning the keyword.
The Little Guys Are Left In The Dust Again
If your blog or website doesn’t receive a lot of traffic, you’re better off sticking to trackers such as the Google Analytics service. Google Trends for Websites won’t have any data for such sites, which is a shame considering the smaller bloggers may be the biggest users of the product. Personally, I don’t see the use for Google Trends for Websites compared to other tools that are out there that offer the same information and more. Blogs already receive the information that Google is giving via their own statistics software with a lot more flexibility and options to choose from. In the end, Google Trends for Websites seems like a bit of a dud and the name should be changed to Google Trends for Popular Websites.
