(I am continuing to review a couple of online tools to track the popularity of ideas over time. Please forgive this segway away from voting reform issues.)
BlogPulse’s trend search tool is another service to track the popularity of search terms over time based on how many blogs mentioned them recently.
Their instructions:
Type your search terms in the boxes on the left. Type descriptive labels for each search into the boxes on the right. Then choose your time frame: 1, 2, 3 or 6 months.
They only allow three terms to be searched and graphed at a time.
Here is an example search of “evoting” vs “voting machine” vs “gerrymandering”. Of note in this sample is that the choice of keywords is very important. “voting machine” and “evoting” may be synonyms but they get very different results.
From my experimentation, it appears that they do NOT support advanced query syntax like boolean expressions in their trend tool.
Wishlist:
- add the ability to compare more than 3 searches per chart
- support advanced search features like boolean expressions and clearly document what is supported
- clearly state whether users are allowed to save trend graph images and host those images on their own sites.
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