Monthly Archives: August 2008

The New York Times Bits Blog reports that Google has reached a deal with advertising company Publicis to sell the search engine marketing portion of Performics, which Google acquired as part of it’s purchase of DoubleClick. The business presented a clear conflict of interest as Performics attempts to increase client’s visibility in Google’s search engine. The deal is expected to close in the third quarter.

Google today announced the launch of Google Insights for Search, a tool that breaks search behavior data down by time, region, and category. The tool builds on Google Trends, providing all the information provided by that tool except for data on language. The tool adds a visual display of regional data using a heat map. The tool allows searching within categories and subcategories. If you were looking for search behavior related to apples, you would select the Food & Drink category to exclude related to the computer company. The tool also provides data as to what are the top and rising search terms related to the term searched for. The different search options can be combined to provide specific data. For example data on searches for prius in 2008 in the US state of California, shows which cities have the most search but also what related terms people have also been searching on.