Over the last few days I’ve been looking to find quality information while researching niches for a possible new project. Research is at the cornerstone of any successful project; with the right amount of information it becomes easier to make projections and you can set your sights and expectations accordingly. The problem with researching on the Internet is that good data is really hard to find. Google used to have an awesome tool called Google Zeitgeist where search information was made public and organized in a usable manner. You could see search trends for a weekly, monthly and yearly period and in my opinion, this tool was great for creating new websites. It was easier to know what kinds of websites people wanted to see and what niches to target.

Since May of this year, however, Google Zeitgeist has been replaced by Google Trends. Although Google Trends provides information that was previously not available through Zeitgeist, it does not give you with the “big picture” that Zeitgeist used to provide. As a marketer, a big picture is really important. While it is possible to use Google Trends to make money by looking at “what’s hot” for the day and keeping an eye on things, it is much more difficult to find a niche to build a website. Yahoo! has a tool called Buzz that makes this easier by providing some metrics like “movers” and “leaders”, but you still don’t have the option to view big picture information based on categories or search words.

I wonder why the ability to view this information has been removed or hidden. I think that marketers could produce better quality content with this information and in return, Google’s index wouldn’t be polluted with so much junk.