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New feature helps drill into people's expressed interests

Another addition to Google provides some extra details about search behavior on the dominant search engine.

The latest update at Google aims directly at the company's revenue stream. An advertiser-friendly feature called Google Insights for Search should help those visitors glean a little more information out of Google.

"It provides more flexibility and functionality for advertisers and marketers to understand search behavior, and adds some cool new features like a world heat map to graphically display search volume and regional interest," Elan Dekel and Niv Efron said on the Inside AdWords blog.

"Like Google Trends, you can just type in a search term to see search volume patterns over time, as well as the top related and rising searches. You’ll also have the ability to compare search volume trends across multiple search terms, categories (commonly referred to as verticals), geographic regions, or specific time ranges."

Insights for Search enables the viewer to enable various filters, to better drill down into activity around a keyword or phrase. As an example, a query for the forthcoming release of the movie Pineapple Express, filtered to look at the US, shows how much interest there is, state by state.

While Rhode Island tops the list for interest in the movie by Google's reckoning, fascination with its actress and Maxim cover girl Amber Heard is heaviest in California and other large-population states, less so in others.

That's a light-hearted look at what Google Insights for Search offers. We think the ability to look at the seasonality of queries will be helpful for our e-commerce readers, as it should help with the planning of ad campaigns throughout the year.