Instructify

February 4, 2009

I get asked one million times a day how people can write a better report. I tell them all the same thing: nothing helps a report better than a good, solid number.

You could probably recall one thousand times when you’ve seen a student write “a lot of evidence supports my paper’s claim, but I don’t have a real definitive number to back my writing up.”

Google Insights for Search is a useful tool that can help make your students’ search for web usage statistics one hundred times easier. Users can gather volume patterns based on search terms across different regions, times, and categories. Interested in how many people in China searched for “YouTube” in 2007? You’ll need to sign in to your Google account to view numbers, but that’s no problem since a Google account will cost you zero dollars.

Of course, this does limit the figures a user will get to the realm of just Google’s search engine statistics. It won’t take into account any searches done via Yahoo or other search engines. Nonetheless, Google is a big name in the search engine game and should provide a good indicator on its own. It can be ideal for a student looking to gauge a topic’s popularity on the web. For a clever user performing a well-specified search the possibilities are…well, there’s a lot of them. -NICK YINGLING

Google Insights for Search

Put a whole book on your web page with Google Book Search previews