Google Zeitgeist & Yahoo! Buzz index

Every once in a while our freinds at Google post some summary information about what folks are searching for. They try to mine, pull together and summarize what people are asking them, I can only imagine how difficult the task may be. They call it their "Zeitgeist". At this year's summary page they've created a few categories and a few topics within those categories which you can click around in.

Yahoo! takes a different approach and shows you the data in a more tabular format. They call their page the Yahoo! Buzz Index and it's actually an interesting place to take a peek at every once and a while. They don't include the historical graphs like Google, it's more of a real-time view of what's going on.

In a nutshell, I see Google's approach as kind of a "Dashboard", it's very high level statistics of what happened in the past (along with the trend analysis). Yahoo!'s approach is more like "Business Activity Monitoring", where you can see what is happening (as of "almost" right now).

Until next time...Rich

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