Ever wonder what other people are searching for? How about a surefire way to measure pop culture? Currently, many of the popular search engines offer a summary of search trends. Google has zeitgeist. Yahoo has it’s buzz index.
Those search engines that don’t have statistics usually have some monitor feature. Metaspy for Metacrawler. The keyhole at Ask Jeeves.
One of my current projects is working on statistical tools for the gnutella network. I’ve hacked together a version of gnut that will provide real-time search statistics. You can find it here.
My thanks to glitterbomb and the folks at Trademark ranch for the great conversations that inspired a lot of this work.
