The other day we spoke about Ego Search and we introduced you to a new search engine called YackTrack, focused on social networks. Today we wish to explore with you some other sites that can help you with trends for your product/website.

The first is an entry is from Nielsen BuzzMetrics. Yes, it’s that Nielsen, the company known for the “Nielsen Ratings”. They offer a paid service called BrandPulse and a free service called BlogPulse Blog Pulse “mines the most common entries in hundreds of thousands of blog posts to uncover the issues, blogs, news items, Web sites and personalities that bloggers are discussing. The BlogPulse home page also features daily stats (total blogs in our index, number of new blog posts indexed, number of new blogs discovered) and BlogPulse Live, a graph that plots discussion by topic in real time.” You can start you search at BlogPulse here, or you can jump right into a BlogPulse trend query.

The second offering is from a company called IceRocket which allows you a quick search of the blogosphere (the world of blogs) via their trend tool and build trend graphs based on terms.

Two other sites that offer blogsearch focus are Technorati and Google Blogsearch. These are basic general searches, which do not offer any extra tools for trending at this time. Nevertheless, both offer deeper coverage in terms of number of blogs than the other previous sites mentioned.

The final tool we will look at is Google Trends. It is not really focused on blogs, so much as search, but considering we are speaking about trends, we thought we should at least make a mention of it. Google Trends is a tool that lets anyone see what the world is searching for, and compare the world’s interest in selected topics. There is also Google Hot Trends, which shows what people are searching for right now – the fastest rising search queries on Google, updated every hour. Recently Google introduced a couple of new layers to their Trend Tools with Google Trends for Websites, and Google Insights. Trends for websites allow you to trend the popularity of searched websites. It compares and ranks site visitation across geographies, and related websites and searches. Google Insights has more focus on search terms. You can compare these terms across specific regions, categories, and time frames.

As you can see, the idea of search is now moving into the world of analysis. We expect in the coming years there will be more improvements in the area. More and more companies are sure to enter the trending and tracking market. This is an important development for business owners, webmasters and advertisers. Using these tools, you can actually have some intelligence in the implementation of your web strategy, your competition and what you customers are talking about. At Mark8t, we are more then happy to work with you on understanding the data and showing you how to make the most of it. Contact Mark8t E-Marketing Solutions today to learn how we can help.