Trend Spotting With Search

Trend watching, cool hunting, call it whatever you want, but the point is to develop a crystal ball which will let you look into the future of a market or culture and divine emergent motions. What’s cool and what’s going to be cool.
It’s pretty trendy right now, everyone’s talking about it, you can hire trendscouts, websites are sprouting up everywhere, and Google just released a trend tracking tool, so you can track and compare historical search volume of specific keywords. But how do you find new things, stuff you don’t even know about yet?
Here’s one way:
When you’re first intrigued about something where do you go to find more? Yes, just like everyone else these days, you Google it, or Yahoo it, or whatever your search engine of choice happens to be. So emergent but popular trends often appear in search traffic data well before they’re on everyone’s radar, and the best way to find these fast growing new search terms is WordTracker’s Short Term Top 1000. I’ve been using this a lot recently to find stuff, and it’s worked very well. It skews towards the myspace/teeny bopper demo a bit, but isn’t that where the cool is anyways? Its easy to find just-about-to-blow musicians and entertainment trends, and playing with the rest of the WordTracker tools can reveal up-and-comming coolness in other markets with a little finagling.
There are plenty of other ways to keep your finger on trends in specific niches and I’ll give away some of the tricks I’ve picked up, most of which are common sense, in the next few days.