The search engines have become an integrated part of our lives. Each and every day billions of searches are made all over the world, reflecting stories of work and leisure, strife and passion, and the interests of millions of Internet searchers.

If you could tap into this enormous amount of data, you could draw maps of fashion, cultural trends, political shifts and anything people are concerned about right now.

The search engine databases are kept under lock and key. The search engine companies hate the thought of loosing the trust of their users. Nevertheless, some aggregate data are available, and on this page your find links to some of the search trend sources found on the Web.

Google Zeitgeist and beyond

Google has a service called Google Zeitgeist that brings up weekly top 10 lists of the most popular searches in several countries and world wide.

With Google Trends, you can compare the world’s interest in your favorite topics. Enter up to five topics and see how often they’ve been searched for on Google over time.

Lycos has a weekly top 50 list, while Yahoo presents various search trends at Yahoo Buzz.

Blogs, bookmarks and folksonomies

Note also that the growth of social networking and bookmarking sites has given as a new wealth of search trend data.

There are actually companies out there that monitoring and analyzing fashion and trends on the basis of social media such as blogs and discussion forums

Some statistics are free, though. The blog search engine Technorati will, for instance, give you a list of the most talked about topics in the blogosphere right now.

Site popularity

There are actually no trustworthy numbers on what sites are the most popular at any given time. Alexa, which bases its data on the habits of its Alexa toolbar users, may give you a certain indication though.

For these and other web trend sources, see the categories on this page.

Popular search terms in search engine marketing

Reading lists of the most popular search queries is entertaining. Social scientists ought to love the stuff. So far, however, it is the marketing people who has made the best use of this search information.

The search trends tell them what people find interesting right now, making it possible to adapt product and service development to what’s fashionable or upcoming.

This certainly applies to search engine marketing experts as well. Do you want to know what kind of affiliate program to go for and what product to sell? Look at what people search for and make sites and web pages covering these topics.

Om Malik wrote at GigaOm, “If Yahoo is turning to Jajah for Voice on IM, then AOL wants to offer others an ability to integrate AIM Call Out service via its Open Voice APIs into softphones, as well as SIP-enabled hardware and cell phones with Wi-Fi connectivity. AIM Call Out is a pay-as-you-go outbound voice calling service built right into AIM.” He continued, “Jajah, AOL Open Voice, Ribbit and scores of others are taking a platform approach to VoIP, hoping that adding voice to applications will drive up minute volume and turn them into a viable business.”

TMCnet.com reports, “Many users are loathe to run multiple IM clients, so many switched from AIM to Skype because they could get IM, plus voice & video — all in a single client. Why bog down system resources with multiple IM clients? I will say AOL has done a good job of beefing up the feature-set of AIM, but one has to wonder if Skype’s momentum is unstoppable.” The piece continues, “In any event, Steve Murphy, Senior Vice President, AOL said, ‘By opening up our voice communications gateway to developers we’re furthering the mission of AIM which is to facilitate the world’s real-time conversations. We’re building on the popularity of the Open AIM program and opening up the AIM Call Out platform, enabling open standards voice communication services to proliferate in the marketplace.’”