When it comes to search engines in 2009, most of the buzz has been around ‘Twitter Search’.  Twitter allows you to search for what people are talking about in ‘real time’.

Both Google and Bing have jumped on the ‘real-time’ bandwagon. To start with Google started featuring almost-real-time results from prominent bloggers, and Bing began to surface Tweets from a few well known Twitter accounts. Last week, both separately announced deals to deliver the full Twitter index on their Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).

But if you know where to look, Twitter Search can give you a lot more than just finding who is using particular keyword. The Twitter Advanced Search Interface lets you search for keywords used in very specific circumstances.

This is what it looks like:

So what can you find out using this form?

To start with, you can specify the context of the keyword that you’re searching with. Do you want to find all mentions of that keyword, or is it more useful to find out instances when it is being Tweeted in conjunction with other keywords?

This would be insightful if you run a B&B and you want to find if you can reach out to anyone on Twitter. There’s probably not much point in searching for ‘B&B’ on its own, since its going to be used so frequently in so many situations. But if you search for ‘B&B’ and your ‘local area’, you might able to identify those people who are looking for your service, and who would appreciate you getting in touch.

It’s also possible to use the form to discover who is mentioning a particular keyword, and which people have this keyword in their @ Tweets. This can help you to monitor how competitors are making use of Twitter. Are they dealing with lots of support issues? Are they getting sales enquiries? Are they being asked prices? Can you learn how to improve your use of Twitter by seeing how they’re doing it?

The form also lets you specify the time frame of the Tweets. You could use this to find out how a news item affected your industry at a specific time. Let’s say that there is a news story about a particular manufacturer and you want to know if they get discussed the next day. This might help you decide whether or not to feature this manufacturer’s products on your homepage. You could also use this feature to find out how your competitors’ use of Twitter has changed over time.

Here’s where the form get interesting: you can search for tweets that have a certain ‘attitude’. Let’s say you wanted to look for all Tweets mentioning a competitor in a negative way. The results will display all Tweets using that keyword with common ‘frowns’  such as ‘:-(‘ and other negative statements. This might show you Twitterers who were unhappy with your competitor, and would therefore be open to an approach from yourself.

Lastly, you can specify the location of Tweets, whether that’s in a particular place or in the surrounding area. At the moment Twitter uses the location given by each user profile; those on the move can include actual coordinates. If you retail from a bricks and mortar premises, you could use this to find out more about the geographic reach of your business. If you knew that people rarely mentioned you more than 50 miles away, you might conclude that your AdWords campaign should be set to only appear within this radius.

Take a look at the Twitter Advanced Search and let us know what you can find out. You can also check out our twitter page here.

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As a website owner, the chances are that you’ve thought long and hard about how to drive traffic to your website from Google. You can do this through either Search Engine Optimisation or Pay per Click Advertising.

Whichever you choose – and we recommend both – the first step on this journey is all about identifying the right keywords to use in your campaign. That’s where the Google Insights for Search tool can come in handy.

Once you’ve found a search term you think you want to use, type it into the Google Insights search box. The tool lets you know the number of searches for that term, looks at the data historically, and produces a graph to show how that search term has trended since 2004. You can also compare 2 or more search terms on the same graph, to see which is the most popular.

This gets interesting when you start to filter the search term data by industrial sector (called a ‘vertical’) and geographical area. A good example of this can be found by looking at the search term ‘blackberry’. Almost all searches including the word ‘blackberry’ will be related to the mobile phone. If you sell fruit online, you do not want your website to rank highly in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) for searches related to mobile phones! But you still need to know how many searches are relevant to ‘blackberry’ the fruit.

You can use Google Insights to filter results to just the Food & Drink category.

Let’s say you are based in Kent, you might only be able to deliver fruit to the South East.  You can use Google Insights to filter by Geography. What you’re left with are the search trends for those searches that are specifically relevant to selling blackberries (the fruit) in the South East.

If you sell a seasonal product, Google insights can also help you identify when demand will be high.

Searches for ‘buy Easter egg’ peaked this year on the 8th April, which was actually 4 days before Easter. If you sell Easter eggs online then you need to make sure that your Google AdWords account has excess of budget on this day, and that you are holding enough stock.

Google Insights can also help you find out whether it’s worth stocking a new product on your website, or removing others from your inventory. Before making any decisions, enter the product name into Google Insights to see whether searches for that product are going up or down.

If the trend is rising fast then you might want to start featuring that product on your site. For falling graphs, maybe it’s not worth restocking that item.

Although all the graphs produced by Google represent an index rather than an actual figure, Google Insights is still a great tool to identify search trends relevant to your website.
Have a go at using the tool to see what you can find.

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Interesting little domain name related story in The Guardian last week. The domain name extension .yu, the country code for the now-disintegrated former Yugoslavia, was finally retired last Wednesday.

This extension has been replaced by .rs (Serbia) and .me (Montenegro), although at the time the Guardian article was written, about 4,000 .yu domains hadn’t switched to one of these new extensions yet. Any sites which didn’t make the move will now be unavailable.

It’s not often that domain name extensions get removed from use. And the relative ease at which .yu has been phased out seems to contrast quite strongly with .su, a relic from the days of the Soviet Union.

Despite the fact the Soviet Union ceased to exist in 1991, registrations of .su domains actually increased in 2008. There’s a plan to phase it out too, but it’s been met with a reasonable amount of resistance from people nostalgic for the days of the USSR – as well as from internet entrepreneurs who think that can make money out of these anachronistic domains.

Free market entrepreneurs making money from the old Soviet Union’s domain name extension? Surely we can’t be alone in seeing the irony in that.

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