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There are two approaches to searching the surfer, the first is locally, that is in your own home or office etc. The second is globally, everybody online, whose search information is not accessible locally. Let's start with the global searchers.

Like never before, we can access and analyse globally what people online are doing, saying, feeling and thinking about, and who else to accurately search the searchers, and present that information freely and accessibly, but the King of search, Google. There are other ways of searching the surfers, and I will mention some, but I have been to and used all of them. For me as a writer who must have an informed opinion, based on the use of the many tools of information, which allows me to perform comprehensive holistic research and analysis; on a multitude of topics. Google Trends reigns as one of these tools.

Google Trends started out as Google Zeitgeist (it officially closed on May 22nd 2007), and is a current data analysis tool that focuses on trends in Google searches and goes from to January 2004, up to the hour. Like any tool it takes a bit of learning before you can fully utilise it for your own specific purposes. The first page of Google Trends shows a search bar and lists the current top ten Hot Trend searches; it also shows some examples of how to search.

For a look at the top 100 searches (default USA) click on More Hot Trends, it will lead you to the top 100 Hot Trends search page. This can be quite handy for a quick look at the daily hot searches, and you can additionally specify which, single day, going backward from the first day displayed. They are rated in terms of Hotness which ranges from cold to the ultimate Volcanic.

If you click on one of the Hot Trends, it will take you to the engine page of the Hot Trends. The previous Hot Trends list will now be windowed on the left. The rest of the page breaks into five sections. The first will show the hotness level, related searches, peak time, the three main source locations and a discussion option that searches for related discussions within Google Groups only. The other sections are a graph timeline of that search term, its popularity over that day, related news articles, related Blog posts, and a normal Google web search at the bottom that shows results for that specific search term.

Now if you enter a search term on any page, it will take you to the main engine page of Google Trends. For this article example, I entered: (google trends), (the words not the brackets)

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