Last Sunday night, 60 Minutes aired a special on a potentially new and improved energy source developed by a rocket scientist. The Bloom Box. Originally intended and designed to generate air for use on Mars, the NASA project was later engineered to use Oxygen to generate electricity here on Earth. Touted as a clean energy source and now trending in search.
Real time search
As you can see in the second screen shot from Google real time search, lots of folks are talking about the recently aired program on Twitter. In order for Google to pick up on social media sites buzz there needs to be enough volume to determine whether results show or not.
Trending topics
To trend in search is a metric of content success. In essence you can gauge the success and importance of an item/event/term based around the total amount of universal search options.
What would be interesting, is to do this search over time and see if you can match the curve to another popularity indication metric. If the curves match or least have relative slops and pivot points then universal search could be a cultural indicator. The hard part of doing this is finding and testing keyword variations. The interesting part here, is determining how google adds in universal search items.
Suggest data
It’s particularly impressive that Google incorporates the trend data into Suggest and “Did you mean” in such short order all steaming from ONE segment on 60 min. When you enter a query that’s similar to a more common query, Google’s algorithm will return the full results for partial data entered. Their web site is only 6 pages and only 2 pages have more than 100 characters of content. As the site has little content they clearly will be dependent on other content producers to drive “Buzz”.
Related searches
Three out of the eight related searches are related to the trending topic. These suggestions are available on the bottom of the search page to help you find what you’re looking for more quickly if you didn’t find what you needed in the default setting of 10 results to a page.
Organic search results
Its also very interesting that, despite all the links that the CBS and CNET articles must have received, http://www.bcnorthernlights.com/ is ranking #1 for the term in organic and has little to do with fuel cells.
Video search results
How does Google show the most relevant videos in your search queries and why does a trending topic come up in the universal search results?
“Google combines sophisticated text-matching techniques to find videos that are both important and relevant to your search. Their technology examines dozens of aspects of the video’s content (including number of hits and rating) to determine if it’s a good match for your query.”
Labels used in Bloom Box search results
In a tag query for Bloom Box most referred to the product, video and 60 minutes.
Bloom Energy | Bloom Box | Bloombox Energy | Bloom Energy Fuel Cell | Bloom Box Energy | Bloom Energy Stock | Bloomenergy | Bloom Box Video | Bloombox Energy Video | Bloom Energy Fuel Cell Video | Bloom Box 60 Minutes | Bloombox Energy 60 Minutes | Bloom Box Photo | Bloom Box Pictures | www.bloomenergy.com
Tags used in Bloom Box search results
Tags: 60 minutes, Bloom Box, Bloom Box 60 Minutes, Bloom Box Charge, Bloom Box Cost, Bloom Box Energy, Bloom Box Photo, Bloom Box Pictures, Bloom Box Video, Bloom Box Website, bloom energy, Bloom Energy charge, bloom energy fuel cell, Bloom Energy Fuel Cell Video, Bloom Energy Stock, Bloom Energy Website, bloombox, bloombox energy, Bloombox Energy 60 Minutes, Bloombox Energy Video, Bloomenergy, www.bloomenergy.com, ZERO emissions Bloom Box
Thanks to Overdrive’s John Liu, Stephen Konar, Russ Ain and Michael Orlinski for contributing to this post!