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Taking Advantage of Timely Keywords

One of the tools that I use is a database of recent search engine queries. It now contains about 330 million queries from the past 8 weeks. I use it mainly to identify terms that are actually in use on the Internet in search engine queries. It's great to have good search engine position, or great pay per click campaigns, on your own favorite terms--but what if other terms are the ones that potential buyers are using? So this database helps me answer that question.

As an interesting sideline, though, it's also possible to use this database to make a list of the words that are used most popularly. I thought you'd like to see that list. There are a few interesting conclusions that can be drawn from it.

There is an "adult filter" that excludes overtly sexual words from this list. If that feature was turned off, many of the top twenty terms would be sexual in nature, and in fact sex would be the most popular term. So if you wonder how much pornography there is on the Internet, and how much the regular use of the Internet involves this material, the answer is--a lot.

OK, here are the top twenty one:
Nos Keyword Count

1 paris hilton 159203

2 google 149845

3 yahoo 136072

4 britney spears 131488

5 ebay 126900

6 mapquest 97306

7 yahoo.com 79515

8 halloween costumes 71043

9 weather 70327

10 jokes 62390

11 games 62267

12 89.com 62155

13 girls 61913

14 lindsay lohan 59748

15 dictionary 58399

16 hotmail 56579

17 maps 54556

18 anime 54436

19 olympics 54224

20 thong 53709

21 search engines 52721

One fact emerges quickly from examination of this list--many users of the Internet don't understand it very well. For example, the third most frequent query is yahoo; this means that the user has to get to a search engine site, then type in yahoo, then click on the result to get to yahoo.com--which is itself a search engine. But the seventh most important query is yahoo.com, exactly the same characters that, typed into the address window in the browser, would take the user right to yahoo.com

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