A quick look at Google Internet Stats

Google has released a new online resource called the Internet Stats Center which lets the users browse and search for snippets of information about certain industry trends such as media consumption or broadband usage. The information that Google indexes come from a variety of sources such as newspapers, market research companies, and you can even submit your one.

Having played with this for over 5 minutes, I quite like the concept, and I think it could be a useful tool for doing market research. But they are few things that could be improved on.

Make the service more RESTy: search queries and individual search results (the snippets of information) should have their own URLs that I can bookmark in my browser and share via email or via my other social channels. Having a bookmarked query makes it easy for me to run the search again later to see if and how it has changed. Emailing links is a lot efficient than copying and pasting text.

There is not a great deal of information in the database at the moment. Hopefully this will improve overtime as Google indexes more sources.

Some searches take a very long time to complete, and for a search engine as fast as Google, this is a bit disapointing.

The search results do not appear to be sorted chronologically. Hopefull this won't be hard to fix.