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Each week, Google provides a taste of the top search queries, a site called Google Zeitgeist. At the end of each year, they compile a more comprehensive report of what people have been searching for. The 2005 Zeitgeist has been out since December and provides some interesting insights into online trends over past year. My favourites were world affairs and nature.

Beyond just being interesting, companies such as BuzzMetrics and BlogPulse have realised that analysis of Internet activity will be a useful tool for many companies. They produce tools that mine blogs in a bid to capture consumer sentiment on particular product(s), for example to improve product marketing. Matthew Hurst of BlogPulse has an interesting blog with the odd post covering Internet blogging activity, such as this pre-Oscars analysis.

Another interesting data mining application is the one pioneered by Majestic Research. They provide stock research and earnings forecasts to analysts before actual company information is released. Using web-based data mining, they track the sales of the top consumer-sensitive web companies, and then use this information to infer the company’s performance. Nice!

This entry was posted on Monday, March 6th, 2006 at 3:12 pm and is filed under Data Mining, Geek. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.