WebProNews

Google has introduced an iGoogle gadget for Insights for Search. It displays the top rising searches and top related searches on your Google home page. Users can change the settings to show results for a specific location, keyword, category, or source.

For those unfamiliar with Insights for Search , it is a set of tools that let you look at trends in search to help you apply them to your own marketing campaigns. It includes the following features:

-  A world Geo Heat Map to show volume of traffic from different locations

-  Ability to search trends by location, time frame or category

- News Headlines which may have impacted search volume for a specific time

- Top searches - highest searched terms by category or by region
 
- Rising Searches - fastest growing trends by category or region

At Google's suggestion, marketers should use Insights for Search when they are choosing ad messages, examining seasonality, creating brand associations, and/or entering new markets.

Last month, Google added some additional features to Insights for Search. They added new data sources including Google News, Image, and Product search, to give users better insight into what people are searching for beyond just web search.

They also added category suggestion, which suggests all relevant categories that a term might fit into. For example, "apple" could fit into "computers and electronics," "entertainment," or "food and drink."

Finally, Google added the ability to drill down to specific geographic regions (in the US) to see how search interest levels vary.

The iGoogle Gadget for Insights for Search will keep the tool at the forefront of any marketer's mind that uses iGoogle as their home page (which I suspect is probably a pretty good number). It's a useful tool that has now been made more convenient.