Tracking number of Real Time Searches of different subjects

July 22, 2009 6:23 AM

I need real-time data of the number of people searching different sets of keywords on the internet in a particular location. Some examples: The number of people searching for jobs and jobs related information at that given time(preferably also a particular place as in country or city) The number of people searching for marriage and dating related information. What is the best and cheapest way to get this data? The more real time, the better. Searches on Google would probably be the best given their dominance in the search market, but even other sources would be alright, like Twitter.
posted by tusharj to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

I suspect you might have trouble with getting Google's data because they have said in the past that they keep that information private because they don't want people to start censoring what they google for.
posted by Sully at 8:13 AM on July 22, 2009

Google Insights?

I'd take a look at the entire zeitgeist suite.
posted by bfranklin at 8:35 AM on July 22, 2009

Response by poster: none of these give me real time data.
posted by tusharj at 10:16 AM on July 22, 2009

The closest you'll get to realtime is probably google hot trends. But again the problem is that this is highly proprietary data so you're at the mercy of what the search engines choose to divulge.
posted by Rhomboid at 1:16 PM on July 22, 2009

I remember watching a TED lecture a while back given by a programmer who had written something along these lines - it tracked use of several keywords ("love", "happy", "sad", etc) and could be sorted by location, gender, even weather. That's all I remember, unfortunately, but if you have a bit of time to look through the tech category I'm sure it's still there.
posted by Fifi Firefox at 3:18 PM on July 22, 2009