Google works backwards to the human brain.

(No its not a Google-bash, just an interesting observation of the clash between human-think and techno-think)

Someone once said that you need to know how to spell a word in order to look it up in a dictionary. Searching is just the same.

Try searching for a graphic logo… (ever wonder why ‘The man formerly known as Prince’ chaned his name back from a squiggle?)

Or give it a picture of an unkown location and ask for information on the location

You cant give it a picture and ask to search for similar.

Even when you know some of the details – its really next to impossible to search for “That red brick school with the white picket fence in Northern England”

Now apply that thinking to business use:

You name a product with a generic name – like Microsoft’s ‘Word’ – seems an easy to remember nice generic name – eureka!

If you try searching for “Word problem” you will get an enormous list of kids educational games and the like. And Microsoft are a big company with a global marketing budget – what chances have you got?

So – in the brave new world you need something you can search for becuase in an always-online-and-searching-world

GOOGLE CANT SEARCH FOR WHAT YOU CANT DESCRIBE

• A cool wiggly graphic and no descriptive name on your company cars
• A cool landmark building with insignificant signage
• A company product name that is used to describe a million other things

I seemed to have struck a chord with many of you when I wrote about Google trends recently.

Ive been doing some more digging and the results are intriguing to say the least.

Any business term I use – Marketing, Sales, Business, Trends, Money etc – all are decreasing in popularity. Without exception movie stars, sports and other terms best described as entertainment far outrank business terms.

Technology as a term seems only of importance in India and Australia, while a ranking comparison of God,Good,Evil and Bad has Good way above the others – except in Brazil where Evil wins the day!

It would seem to me the long tail is getting even longer – and the super-mega-stars of the search term rankings still belong to whatever subject the mainstream media gossip about.

Like most people – whenever I am working on a web, blog or other ’searchable’ item – I have one eye on what might appeal to the search engines – the google effect. We all imagine the worlds population sitting at their computers, typing thought provoking terms, and browsing intelligent results.

Yet anytime I look at the Google Hot Trends the most popular terms (volcanic in google-speak) are things like “Flat tummy diet”, “Britney spears” and whatever is being discussed in the broadcast media of the moment.

As I write this – the top ten terms being searched for are:

A new descriptive word appears in a blog

One hour later  a definition is published on Wikipedia

Two hours later it enters Google trends top ten hotlist of search terms for the USA.

One day later – I’ve forgotten the term. No sign of it on Google trends – the world has moved on.