Help me find untapped online searches!

April 25, 2009 8:40 AM

How can I find keywords that many people search for but don't find many links?

For my eHow articles, I would like to maximize my return by writing about stuff that many people search for, but that doesn't have much of an online presence yet. Basically, stuff that is new, yet sought after. Are there any keyword finding programs that can tell you not only how many searches exist for a particular item or issues, and how many related results are returned by the search?

posted by spacefire to computers & internet (4 comments total)

It'll be exceedingly difficult to get raw numbers from any search engine, so I see two ways about this for you. First, see if the eHow people will give you a list of failed searches from eHow's own site-search. This will tell you what people who are already on the site are not able to find. Secondly, if you have the skills you could write a script that loops through a dictionary and searches Google, retaining the number of results for each query. You could then filter on queries that return less than 1000 (or 100, or 1,000,000) results and see if you can't find some subject material in there.
posted by rhizome at 9:54 AM on April 25

You might want to browse WikiAnswer's list of unanswered questions. There have been more than a few times where I've searched for something and turned up a WikiAnswers hit on the first page of results, but that page doesn't have any answers yet.

You could also view the same list of questions through a Google site search, which I assume would sort it by general popularity better than a simple topic-based list.
posted by Rhaomi at 11:11 AM on April 25 [1 favorite]

Google Trends.

Google Insights.
posted by MesoFilter at 12:26 PM on April 25 [1 favorite]

> if you have the skills you could write a script that loops through a dictionary and searches Google

Just to note that this is against their terms of service. If you want to do it, sign up for an API key and do it properly.
posted by AmbroseChapel at 4:21 PM on April 25