This blog post is just to seed some ideas out there.

Idea is to explore how Google search rank along with Google AdWords give valuable trend information. Idea of reaching out to customers and users is nothing new, it’s been going on since man started selling. Thanks to internet, we have more efficient window to analyze our selling and reaching-out instincts.

Google made the analysis of buying and selling stuff very appealing. In-fact Zeitgeist means the general intellectual, moral, and cultural climate of an era. Google Zeitgeist and related trending applications provide exactly that. Insights into our collective intent. (Howard Bloom wrote a wonderful book on the topic of collective brain - Global Brain. His theory was that evolution is a team sport. Based on lot of scientific evidence, he made a convincing case to prove that.)

I believe our collective intent (and yes evolution as well) is fast becoming a search engine sport. There is hardly any web service out there which can confidently say that their direct inbound traffic is more than the traffic coming to them via search engine queries.

Just to see how far this theory goes, I did search on marketing related keywords. I am using search count as a rough measure of popularity.

These numbers say a lot about historical intent. This is how we understand demand and match demand with Google AdWords type targeting tools.

I will come back in next couple of posts on how these serp based demand indicators will be matched by social ads.