New Yahoo! Clues Launches

Have you ever wondered how powerful it would be to instantly discover what’s popular to a select group of searchers – by age or gender – over the past day, week or even over the past year?

What if you had controls at your fingertips that let you slice and dice Yahoo! searchers by criteria such as gender, age group and regional interest, or gain deep insights from comparing search terms?

Welcome to the new Yahoo! Clues. This free service gives you fun and engaging ways to explore what users are searching for on Yahoo!, offering a “behind the scenes” look into popular search trends.  

Top Trends, a key new feature, allows endless exploration of the most popular search terms on Yahoo! Search.  Using filter selections, you can choose a combination of time range, gender, age group and geographic location, and even search term category – and Top Trends shows you what’s popular.

Other enhancements to Yahoo! Clues, first introduced back in November 2010, include:

• New site design – Clues now includes a home page with navigation to the Top Trends and Trend Analysis features.
• More data – We have expanded the history from one month to over 12 months, and covering over three times as many search terms as the previous release.
• Global coverage – All English-language searches globally are available.
• New map – Trend Analysis includes a brand new map that puts the data at the center of the experience with beautiful heat map visualizations.

Yahoo! Clues is one of the key tools behind the popular Yahoo! search trends stories on our blog, such as last week’s post on the Fourth of July searches, this year’s American Idol projections, Oprah’s Effect on web searches, or even search trends after major news events such as the Death of Bin Laden or the Japan earthquake. 

As I discussed with Vera H-C Chan during SXSW Interactive earlier this year, analyzing search trends helps us understand the impulses and processes of why people make their choices at that particular moment in time. Furthermore, the massive global scale of Yahoo! Search activity provides a unique ability to instantly poll a huge sample size of our users to spot future trends or dig into what’s popular.

The questions are endless… 

• What’s most popular today?
• Who has the most searches in the last month, Megan Fox or Lindsay Lohan?
• Who’s the most popular politician by men between 25 and 34 in Texas?
• What’s the most popular baseball team by people in Osaka, Japan?
• Who’s the most popular actress by women vs. men in Brazil in the past week?
• How do your interests stack up to others nearby, or half way around the world?

For more details on what’s new for Yahoo! Clues, visit the Clues help page, and to start exploring now, go check out the new Yahoo! Clues.

– Brian Theodore (@bptheo), Yahoo! Director of Search Products