What is a good term for a search on Google?

What would be a good proxy (estimation) of the popularity of a search term over a period of time. In other words, what can be used to replace google trends?

• Answer:

  It's hard to say. I don't know a good one. For navigational queries such as "facebook" or "gmail", Alexa or any other traffic-measuring service can be approximation. The number of Google results undoubtedly has some correlation with search query popularity, but it's far from ideal, especially for less popular queries. I guess, both of these can be used for popular queries which don't change much over time. For time-related changes, such as break-outs, you may want to take a look at Twitter, or you could also index news and see how frequently a given word appears there. I don't know if there's a service that indexes news already. For slower changes, you can use the Google Ngram Viewer (http://books.google.com/ngrams/info) which indexes millions of books. None of these would be ideal. I think it would only be a marginal improvement over chance if you're looking at two queries which are close, but for more obvious cases (e.g. "weather" vs. "einstein") they might work as well as Trends. Luckily, since Google Trends is available, you can analyze how accurate any of the alternative you devise predicts the real query search volume.