Earlier this week Google announced their annual Zeitgeist report on the search habits of its users. While Obama was the fastest rising search term in the US, Sara Palin took the lead world-wide. (Was the world more worried over the prospect of "President Palin then we Americans were? - Or is it just that her humorous side transcends national boundaries? After all everyone likes a good laugh.)
The fastest rising searches in the U.S. during the year were: 1) Obama; 2) Facebook; 3) AT&T; 4) iPhone; 5) YouTube; 6) Fox News; 7) Palin 8) Beijing 2008; 9) David Cook; and 10) surf the channel.
Look over this list - it is a perfect commentary on the year in review. Indeed, you may want to peruse the full report, where popular searches and fastest rising searches are ranked and categorized in a taxonomy that includes books, US searches, world wide, trend setters, politics and more.
But while the report in and of itself is interesting, what is more interesting to me is the level of insight it provides. This same level of insight is typically available to corporate executives whose organization's are using a solid search engine. Yet, based on my experience working with many companies, this valuable body of knowledge often goes completely untapped. In the Market IQ report on Findability that Dan and I authored earlier this year, key findings included that most users felt that search within their firewall was far less powerful than search on the Internet and nearly half have no specific goals or strategy for search in the enterprise. This includes not leveraging the full potential of the search tool. Typically, when consulting with an organization I will ask to see search logs and reports. Usually the only people that do not look at me like I am speaking a foreign language are from IT. But, typically, while those in IT know what I am talking about, they are not active users of the resource. The depths of knowledge captured by the search engines tracking of searches is not looked at and therefore it is not in any way integrated into various business applications, either manually or automatically. Search query and retrieval habits are an amazing source of BI (business intelligence) - available for free (if you have a search tool that tracks them.) So why aren't more businesses leveraging them?
A casual look at the Google Zeitgeist report demonstrates the insight that can be gained not just about search habits, but topics of interest, topics gaining in interest, arising communities, popular products, trends etc. So again I ask, why don't more organizations use this type of search mining in-house to gain similar levels of insight on rising customer and employee concerns, popular HR issues, common reference points ... Most business executives, I find simply do not understand or appreciate the power and insight provided by search analytics.
If you encounter an executive who fails to see why search needs to be better funded and supported with specific strategy, perhaps a simple nudge to look at the Google Zeitgeist report will be enough. Its worth a try. I know I am going to try using it.
