Basically, it's a Google

"What you can find out now on the Internet - it's remarkable."

John McCain might be on to something. With the launch of Google Insights for Search on August 6, you can not not only find a running mate, you can see where he or she is a hot search term.

Despite some valid concerns with the data in the early going - some tests conducted on different days with the same criteria returned markedly different results - the potential for Insights to become a game-changing tool for for SEM/SEO strategists is clear.

But wait! There's more!

In a Mashable post last week, Garrett Wasny looked at social networking terms and how they're trending across the country. Coupled with the growing trend of "navigational search", the information from Google Insights could be used to inform user experience planning. Think about it: building an intranet mashup for a multi-national corporation with users in the UK, where "facebook" gets more search activity than "youtube" and "wikipedia", might mean placing a higher priority on activity streams and blogs over video and wikis. In France, it's "youtube" over "facebook" and "wikipedia", so the home page of the continental employees might be arranged differently to match their preferences as compared to their counterparts across the English Channel.

You get the idea. It's certainly not the only thing to consider in UX planning, but given the ease of gathering and using this sort of data, there's little reason not to add it in to the mix.

Google TV Ads

As long as we're on the subject of Google...

While talking with fellow Telligenti George Dearing the other day, we got on the subject of measuring the ROI of online marketing efforts. That reminded me of a post I wrote on the RD2 blog in May about Google's television advertising service and the opportunity for tighter integration and measurement of online and offline campaigns.

I was serious about the :CueCat, too. If one of those showed up in my mailbox today, it'd make a lot more sense now than it did in 1999 or whenever Radio Shack sent those out.