Google Cloud Pub/Sub Starters for gcloud Version v0.15.x
Google Cloud Pub/Sub starters/examples/references for Node.js gcloud version v0.15.x.
Usage:
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topic
Understand Google Trends Search Term and Topic
“Google Trends is a public web facility of Google Inc., based on Google Search, that shows how often a particular search-term is entered relative to the total search-volume across various regions of the world, and in various languages.” - Google Trends - Wikipedia
How you type your search term in Google Trends will determine the results you will see. As described in Google Trends help page, there are four different ways:
- A B
- “A B”
- A + B
- A - B
I am going to illustrate a few examples to explain the difference with the following fixed parameters:
- Location: United States
- Time range: 2013
- Categories: All categories
- Type: Web Search
A B
Search term format A B is the most common format:
- Must contains both words
- Words can be any order
- Other words can be included, such as
A B C - “No misspellings, spelling variations, synonyms, plural or singular versions” - Google Trends Help
Let’s start by comparing three search terms ‘tennis shoes’, ‘tennis’ and ‘shoes’:
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This shows the first point above, that both words much be in the search term. Otherwise, the difference should not be this large.
The order of the search term matters a little. This can be done by simply comparing ‘tennis shoes’ and ‘shoes tennis’:
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Another example is ‘Barack Obama’ vs. ‘Obama Barack’:
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The third point can be demonstrated with the conjunction of the format "A B" (to be shown later).
The fourth point is actually the most important, because variation matters. For example, comparing ‘tennis shoes’, ‘tennis shoe’, and ‘tenis shoes’:
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Or, ‘ugg’ and ‘uggs’:
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Here, when people search either ‘ugg’ or ‘uggs’ on Google, most likely, they mean the same thing. So, the actual trend should include both search terms.
“A B”
The format "A B" means exact search:
- Order is important
- No additional words included
Here is comparison among three search terms ‘“tennis shoes”‘, ‘“shoes tennis”‘ and ‘tennis shoes’:
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There are people who search for ‘“shoes tennis”‘ exactly, but that the volume is too small when comparing to the other two.
This example also shows that since search term format A B allows additional words to be added such as A B C. Therefore, its volume is higher than "A B" search term format.
A + B
Search term format A + B is an OR operation. For example, compare ‘tennis’, ‘shoes’, ‘tennis + shoes’, and ‘shoes + tennis’:
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The sum of tennis and shoes is equal to either tennis + shoes or shoes + tennis.
A - B
A - B search term format excludes searches containing B. The search words can be A C, but not A B. For example, ‘tennis’ and ‘tennis - shoes’:
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Search term tennis can include shoes, therefore, it is higher than tennis - shoes, which disallow shoes.
Special Characters
“Currently, search terms that contain special characters, such as an apostrophe, single quotes, and parentheses, will be ignored. For example, if you type women's tennis world ranking, you get results for womens tennis world ranking.” - Google Trends Help
Topics
Without variations such as misspellings, synonyms or special characters, we cannot truly capture the user’s online search intention. As explained by the blog post, An easier way to explore topics and entities in Google Trends, when we search for rice, are we looking for Rice University or the rice we eat? Or how to count all the variations when looking up Gwyneth Paltrow, such as Gwen Paltro or Lead actress in Iron Man?
That’s why Google Trends introduces topics, where the semantics of the search are used, not only variations, but actual meanings. Google Trends topics is still in beta: “Measuring search interest in topics is a beta feature which quickly provides accurate measurements of overall search interest. To measure search interest for a specific query, select the ‘search term’ option.” And “when you measure interest in a search topic (Tokyo - Capital of Japan) our algorithms (Google Trends) count many different search queries that may relate to the same topic (東京, Токио, Tokyyo, Tokkyo, Japan Capital, etc). When you measure interest in a search query (Toyko - Search term), our systems will count only searches including that string of text (“Tokyo”).”
Here is an example of the retail company Nordstrom, comparing between search term and topic (the dotted line is topic and the solid line is search term):
Here is another example of Laura Mercier Cosmetics:
The topic algorithm is likely to count both ‘Laura Mercier Cosmetics’ and ‘Laura Mercier’:
Another good example is ‘Apple’ (fruit), ‘Apple Inc.’ (consumer electronic company) and ‘apple’ (search term):
Indeed, when a search is apple, it means more than just the maker of iPhone and iPad:
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We can build our own topic by using the format A + B to include all variations, for example, topic Flip-flops (Garment) closely resembles the sum of flip flop and flip flops (see the OR operator):
For some search terms, if we do not use topic or omitting different variations, we might get a wrong impression of the search trend. For example, comparing flip flops and Bahamas, on the peak, people who search for flip-flops is almost the same as people look for Bahamas:
Conclusion
Using search term in Google Trends has its limitation because it does not capture all variations such as misspellings, spelling variations, synonyms, plural or singular version, or special characters. And more importantly, the semantics of the search term is not captured. That’s why Google introduces topic to improve the result.
Google Trends has a limited number of topics, for those search terms without a corresponding topics, we need to a taxonomy system to include all the variations in order to capture the true semantics of the search.