The new Google Trends product that measures website traffic (the old product simply measures search queries) is a great way to get data on website traffic. It may not be perfect, but it’s yet another data source to help people understand what’s happening on the Internet.
But curiously Google has blocked most Google properties from the product. Do a search for Google.com and you get nothing. Same for YouTube, Blogger, Picasa, etc. As Google Operating System pointed out, there are a few smaller properties that do show data, so it isn’t an across the board exclusion.
Google isn’t supplying any good explanation for the exclusion. They told GOS: “We have policy of not providing interim financial guidance, and have decided not to release Google numbers in accordance with that policy.” That explanation doesn’t make sense because the tool should be an estimate based on the same data sources that Google uses for everyone else.
A better explanation, provided by one of our commenters. is probably that Google simply isn’t able to use its own tools for estimating traffic – since by definition all the data is being gathered by Google for the product is from Google users (their toolbar, for example), the data for Google’s sites would be skewed to 100% of all Internet users. It points out an inherent flaw in the product, and I’m not sure Google can easily solve it.
I sort of doubt they get much of that info from the toolbar rather than their site itself, although the same problem remains. If they (as I think) measure which search results get clicked on in SERPs, it would measure a sample far beyond anyone else’s ability.
But still, they would all have come from Google in the first place so those results would be less than useful. It’d still be cool for comparison.
I was also thinking they should avoid displaying too much since people apparently think anything over 80% is a ‘monopoly’ these days. No sense in chumming the waters.
Google is just Google. They are too big to give explanations. Is sad that they do that but what can we do without Google?….:)
It let me compare google vs yahoo
http://www.goog...ll&date=all
@David It didn’t let you compare the websites, only the searches, which is the point of this new feature.
@David Smith: You have to use the “Website” trends, not the “Search” trends. If you click on “Websites” you will see that google’s data is missing.
to track youtube, don’t you just type in “youtube”?
Just add all the data together. Google is the internet, duh.
@David,
If you run through the website trends for Google.com and Yahoo.com, http://trends.g...ctab=0&sa=N you get to see the datas of only Yahoo! not Google!
You are trying to search for google.com and yahoo.com as a keywords search not as website trends!
Cheers!
Isn’t Jaiku part of Google’s acquisition/service? http://trends.g...=all&sort=1
I wonder they missed it?
Missed What lol
yahoo.com shows a decent picture over the last year. Their traffic is increasing according to Google Trends. I wonder if Google is too, or if they are declining to Yahoo?
live.com is consistently about 20 million lower than Yahoo.
The reason you gave makes more sense, so I wonder why, since this is the likely explanation, that they aren’t simply saying that.
The explanation that Google’s product simply can’t measure its own traffic is most likely correct. A quick check of Alexa shows that it does not supply statistics for its own site either.
LA better explanation, provided by one of our commenters. is probably that Google simply isn’t able to use its own tools for estimating traffic
Are you sure this is an accurate assessment? Google says that it’s data comes from a “number of sources”, so let’s NOT assume those sources are limited to toolbar and analytics data. It’s hard to imagine that Google isn’t one of the most effective internet co’s when it comes to tracking and warehousing traffic data across all properties, and across many metrics.
Google simply decides not to share this data with the world, probably because it would lead to an ongoing ‘Comscore effect’ on the company’s stock price.
But let’s not assume that it would be difficult for Google to add its traffic data to the Trends tool. It’s an issue of corporate policy, not of technology or data.
Your commenter’s explanation doesn’t fly. It explains why they can’t currently report on Google.com (same reason Alexa can’t provide numbers for Alexa.com) but there’s no reason they couldn’t provide data for YouTube, Blogger, etc. (Alexa displays numbers for other Amazon properties just fine.)
Google just doesn’t want to.
Seems like they’re all about organizing and displaying the world’s information, privacy be damned… unless it’s Google’s information. *That’s* private.
Yes google just don’t want to. You can access some google products like feedburner but not blogger or youtube. What if I want to compare blogger to wordpress and livejournal? Also using web trends is helpful for country specific trends. For example if I want to compare blogger, wordpress and blogcu.com usage in turkey I can see that blogcu is more used than wordpress but do not know anything about blogger data.
I think it is double standards and beginning of google monopoly
Google, display google properties data or give ability to hide other sites without being removed from google indexes. (pls)
I covered this on my own blog (I believe beating you to it by a few hours, for the record). I’m pretty sure Google uses Google Analytics and can display all the day it wants. Also note that Compete and Quantcast have found ways to report on themselves – you can try those for yourself. If Google can’t do it, that should make you concerned over all of its site trends. If it can and isn’t, that should make you even more concerned over Google blocking people from Googling them.
http://google.c...=all&sort=0
Works perfectly fine.
Don, you missed the earlier comments. Click on websites in the upper left corner, next to searches.
the whole thing just seems extremely weak. Is this the best that they can come up with? beats alexa, but that’s about it. still nothing beyond domains. can’t do any real planning with this thing. cpms vary way to much at large publishers to plan at the domain level.
Has google labs come up with anything that has lived up to the hype? they should have the resources to blow everyone else away. dk. maybe its just me, but a par offering from goog has to be viewed as failure.
it’s the same reason why alexa.com has never shown its own rank, it’d be unrealisticly high
Hotmail is on top of chart
http://www.goog...=all&sort=0
So people can use the data to compete with each other but not with Google. How “nice”!
That’s pretty awesome. That’s definitely why alexa.com don’t show their ratings.
@Layne, thanks for that, sorry I missed it.
i think www is needed to be able to see the traffic
I know that yandex is leader as search engine in Russia, not google and google should show it honestly. Same may apply to google usage in other countries. For example as youtube banned in Turkey, we should be able to see if izlesene.com became more popular than youtube.com in Turkey. But I suspect google may be hiding its own sites because of huge gap between google and yahoo or microsoft on worldwide scale. I find it unfair overall.
Google website trends dont give accurate information thats what google says.. and most funny part of it is that google’s trends for website doesn’t have it’s own site data as this moment
The data is based on traffic coming from Google Search. That doesn\’t mean the numbers for Google.com domain will get skewed to 100%. Most of the traffic on Google.com is direct.
I am not seeing any inherent flaw. Anybody please explain.
“A better explanation, provided by one of our commenters. is probably that Google simply isn’t able to use its own tools for estimating traffic – since by definition all the data is being gathered by Google for the product is from Google users (their toolbar, for example), the data for Google’s sites would be skewed to 100% of all Internet users. It points out an inherent flaw in the product, and I’m not sure Google can easily solve it.”
Duh! Just report the Toolbar data to a specific domain. toolbar.google.com, for exaple, and just measure, google.com and http://www.google.com, not toolbar.google.com.
just take a trial of it.
much better data than alexa, and great news for webmaster to see their competitor’s data.
Just checked all my clients’ web sites – none of them have search data. They’ve been around for almost 10 years, so there must be another explanation then just conspiracy
Google very imortant for the nations
These data are only relatively accurate, I think. You don’t want to publish data that way off compare to other well established data collectors like Alexa. Questions will be raised, publicity and what not… [a thought of a noob]
I’ve just tried Google.com and Youtube.com on Google Trends and I get a graph starting in 2004. I am providing a link to a screen shot in case some do not believe me: http://i27.tiny...com/15fhdmb.jpg
So, is it working or am I too tired and I did not read this article properly?
This is just another classic example of how Google wants to open up every other ones data but their own. What an openness stance!!
Google is showing trafic for one of it’s sites… go to: http://www.google.rs
“The data is based on traffic coming from Google Search” I think this is not the only source. Forgot about google analytics ? Many websites have the google analitycs code added into their code.
We already wrote some parameters to use it in SeoQuake (FireFox seo plugin), so you can see all Gtrends data just in SERP or visiting site. (looks like alexa toolbar). You can get it here http://addons.s...&res_lim=10
more about seoquake – at seoquake.com
Michael, you do have a point.
There should be absolute traffic data.
Google is following Alexa strategy not to reveal its own data. I referred to this over a year ago in a post: Can a search not search itself: http://www.tren....com/blog/?p=73
now even those small referred one’s (like jaiku.com) are not available too – big brother reads you
Hi AT what are u doing now have fun and also LoL