Yesterday’s “Real Time Search and Major Search Engines” session (catchy) at the SMX West had a few interesting developments from some of the biggest companies in the field. Not least of which came from Yahoo’s Ivan Davtchev whose stage appearance took a surprise twist when he announced that a Yahoo alternative to Google Trends could well be on the way to the general public in the form of Yahoo TimeSense.
Google Trends is a public tool which allows users to monitor how popular specific search terms are over time with key spikes identified with relevant articles to specific events via a graph. The trends are also shown by relevance to region, specific cities and languages making it easier to gauge the keyphrases relevance to your target market. This makes it a potentially very useful tool for marketing and optimisation.
However, with the announcement of their rival application Yahoo insist that their app builds on the frailties of Google’s service. During the session Davtchev insisted that TimeSense is a better alternative as its complex use of language modelling allows it to more accurately determine the relevance of queries right now. Furthermore, it differs from Trends in that while Trends is good at identifying ‘head’ queries, TimeSense provides better identification of long tail queries. This aspect could make TimeSense more useful for more specific or ‘targeted’ terms.
The screen shots used in the presentation by Davtchev where apparently taken from an application currently used within the Yahoo company indicating that the service has been running for some time and is already well developed. This could bode well for it if it is publically released, which by Davtchev’s response sound like it might be reasonably soon.
Comparitive Trends of Ronaldinho and Beckham Courtesy of Google Trends
One other aspect to consider however is that there is already another alternative available from Google themselves. The ‘Insights for Search’ tool provides a more comprehensive tool with advanced filtering and features with the same backbone. The fact that Yahoo chose not to option this for comparison seems to suggest either a lack of forethought or deliberate omission. Either way it will be up to Yahoo’s tool to prove itself a worthy alternative, if and when it arrives.
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