Google Suggest Explorer: Find popular keyword searches
I've been playing around with Google Suggest a bit, Google's autocompletion service used by the Google Toolbar and various web applications to quickly display popular search phrases given a set of words or even a word fragment. If you're looking to target a topic, it's useful to know which keyword variants get searched for most often. To this end, I've put together a little tool I call the Google Suggest Explorer which you can use to explore Google Suggest without entering a lot of text. Just enter the word or word fragment you want to start with and from then on you can click on the phrases and words that get shown to quickly drill down to the most interesting keyword variants. You can also access the tool directly from your browser by appending the string “?q=keyword” to the page address. For example:
http://www.memwg.com/suggest.html?q=mesothelioma
You may get the occasional error from Google when using this service, usually a “503″ error which means Google's servers are too busy. Just wait a second and try again.
I can talk some more about how the tool was written if anyone's interested. It's a very small piece of Java code, nothing fancy, most of the work is in parsing the XML returned by Google Suggest (you can also get the data back as JavaScript or in CSV format) and transforming it into a table.
Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. You can read this blog by mail if it's more convenient for you, just send a blank email to memwg-blog@aweber.com to subscribe.
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