When you use a search engine, you often get thousands, or millions, or results… but where do those results come from? When were they published? How do results from news sites differ from results from social media? A new service has just launched that aims to answer these questions and more.
Hitsplitter analyses Google search results, allowing you to find out where in the world, and on what types of sites, people write about brands, products, people or any keyword.
You can even look at how different keywords compare, allowing you to see, for example, how many people are writing about the iPhone compared to Android. So, you can see that among US-based blogs, Engadget has written most about the iPad, while Gawker had the most mentions of rival tablet the Samsung Galaxy Tab.
Why would you want to do this? It’s really aimed at hardcore web researchers but if you’re the kind of person who loves to pore through statistics, it’s fascinating to see how stats for your web searches break down.
It’s possible to see, for example, that Russian websites have mentioned Wikileaks the most of any country over the past week, while (perhaps unsurprisingly) there’s barely a mention of the controversial website on US government domains. There are more interesting example searches in the video below.
The site, launched today by Dutch founder Stefan Hoevenaar, is aimed at journalists, economists, linguists, marketers, etymologists, brand watchers and cyber-geographers; but anyone who enjoys a bit of info-porn should try it out.
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