Geographic spread of search activity

Sometimes we want to know if search activity for a particular keyword is uniform over a certain geographical area (particularly if we treat it as a proxy for the degree of spread of say a brand or company name). Maybe you want to know if a tool like friendfeed is spreading globally, or if your competitor brand is more uniformly searched for throughout the US than your's is. This little tool will calculate the relative spread of search volume, as a percentage, where 100% indicates perfectly uniform search activity and 0% represents entirely localised search activity.

For this to work, you will need to do a 'compare by search terms' query on Google Insights, download the corresponding CSV file and upload it here.

For a few examples, see my blog post measuring geographic spread of search activity.

Please note:

• This is designed to compare one or more keywords over a single location (ie the 'compare by search terms' option on Google Insights). If you feed in a CSV file that compares by location, you will get a garbage result.
• At the moment, only worldwide and country-level searches are supported. So it's not possible to see the spread within, say, California. If people really want this feature, I'll make it happen
• If you get a result of '0%', this will almost always mean that Google doesn't have enough data for the keyword in the region
• When doing a country-level calculation, be aware that a degree of approximation is used for countries other than the US, UK and Australia. Relative values will still be meaningful, but there may be a universal inflation of all values (for a reason which I can explain to anyone who cares).
• This whole process would be easier if Google Insights had and API. But it doesn't.
• If you find this useful you're probably a hardcore web strategy nerd, which means that you might like my blog.