Posted By Paul Kafasis on May 11th, 2006

Yesterday, Google released a new search tool called Trends. It’s interesting enough, but there’s not really enough precision to the data for it to be terribly useful. Looking at Apple vs. Microsoft is interesting, particularly the news traffic. I played with it for a few minutes, then moved on. However, this morning I thought “Hey, I bet I can find something interesting about our traffic, as it relates to Google. We get a lot of our traffic from Google (as always, name your company something not just memorable, but spellable as well). The trend for “Audio Hijack” is as seen below:

As far as I can tell, that’s not terribly useful. There’s an odd curve from Q1 to Q2 of 2004, that looks neat. But we’ve got two peaks, around the middle of 2005 and the beginning of 2006, that look nearly identical. Because there’s no y-axis scale, we can’t really tell how different they are. That peak is probably Macworld 2006 or so, which might be interesting but now we’re just guessing.

Perhaps other developers will see more interesting data when analyzing their own search terms, if they’re lucky enough to have something unique. Next up I tried a comparison against other Mac applications. This is perhaps a bit more useful as far as comparisons go. Below, you can see a comparison between Audio Hijack and my personal nemesis Brent Simmons’ NetNewsWire.

Just in case we seem to be getting a swelled head, here’s another even more fun comparison – “Audio Hijack” vs. “Apple”.

Yes, we flatlined in that search – we’re that thin red line you see at the bottom, and Apple’s the blue, kicking our butts. Just give us a few years though – I’m sure Apple will be beleagured again soon.