In my ever growing obsession with all that is XML, I often find myself going back over old ground and finding neat and new gems hidden within. Today, of course, was no exception - otherwise, I wouldn’t be here right now, would I?

Back when I had my big old movie database site, I used to keep an eye on the Yahoo Buzz Index quite regularly. This is a section on Yahoo that has daily updates of the “Hot Search Topics” from the Yahoo Search engine. Though, it is definitely geared toward people who have sites dealing with home entertainment, music, sports, TV, movies, and the like, it can still give people some insight into various trends that are going on.

I’ll give you a little tour of the Buzz index and share my little finding with you inside…

As we all know - or at least should know - many search terms are current events driven. A term that may get 50 searches a year may suddenly leap up to 50,000 searches a day just based upon a news item or other external stimulus. For example, the search term “St. Joseph’s Basketball” jumped over 10,000% between Monday and Tuesday this week. That means that if 100 people searched for it on Monday, 1,000,000 did the same search on Tuesday. If you’d been following the trend, your site that sells team jersey replicas might have been better positioned to capitalize upon that jump.

The Yahoo! Buzz Index

As I mentioned in the intro, the index is tailored toward the type of people who use Yahoo. It’s not going to be a heck of a lot of use for folks who have a web site about ASP programming, for example. The index is broken down into various categories - TV, Music, Sports, Actors, Movies, and Video Games. There are also some seasonal and more specialized categories. For example, a site dealing with politics would be interested in the special Presidential Canditates Index.

Beyond that, the index not only tracks the most frequently searched terms for each category, but it also tracks the Movers and Shakers. This tells you the terms that have taken a large jump in search frequency over the last 24 hours. And, of course, you can also keep track of the terms that are on their way out of vogue. (Interestingly, it seems that there is suddenly very little interest in India Pakistan Cricket, anymore).

And, now for my find.

I’m not sure when it got added, but there’s now a whole page of Buzz Index RSS Feeds that you can point your feed reader at and keep all the information at your fingertips. If your site is of general interest, the overall feeds may be best for your needs, but if you are more focused on one of the other categories, you can mine down into each category and get the stuff that’s more relevant to you. (Here’s the Overall Movers’ Feed all HTML formatted for you to take a look at.)

No matter what your site is about, I can’t say strongly enough how important it is to keep an eye on news and other areas of day to day life that might affect the types of searches people will be making that relate to your sector. If your site is entertainment based, the Yahoo Buzz is indispensable at helping you see exactly what people are searching for.

Good Luck and happy trending!