Should you use Google Trends to Estimate Site Traffic?

Google Trends for Websites is one among the few online tools that you may use to get an idea of a website’s traffic. Simply provide the address (URL) of the website and the tool will give you a rough estimate of the number of people who visit that site per day (unique visitors).

For instance, this report generated by Google Trends seems to suggest that the Wikipedia website, on an average, gets around 40 million unique visitors daily.

But how accurate is Google Trends data? I was recently comparing the Google Analytics data with Google Trends for labnol.org and, surprisingly, the results were vastly different. See these Google Trends and Google Analytics charts for the same period.

Google Analytics Chart for labnol.org

Google Trends Chart for labnol.org

The Google Trends chart for this site seems to suggest that global traffic (daily unique visitors) has been on a constant decline since March 2011 and almost hit the December 2008 level. However, another data source - Google Analytics - paints a very different picture.

Analytics puts the daily visitor count at 100K while Trends calculates that number as 50K. Yes, there was a dip in March when Panda struck but the site recovered soon thereafter.

Anyone else seeing such a discrepancy for their site in Google Trends?

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A Simple Fix for iOS 5 Upgrade Errors 3002 & 3200

If you have been trying to upgrade your iPad, iPhone or iPod Touch to the all-new iOS 5 but getting unknown errors with codes that read like 3200 or 3002, here’s one possible solution.

I have used the same technique to update my iPad 1 and iPad 2 with iOS 5 and the software installed without any problems.

First you need to download the iOS 5 IPSW files from the Apple servers. Click the link that corresponds to your iOS5 device - iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4 GSM, iPhone 4 CDMA, iPad (original), iPad 2 WiFi, iPad 2 GSM, iPad 2 CDMA. Remember that IPSW files are 700+ MB in size so you should probably use a download manager that can resume broken downloads.

Once the firmware file has downloaded, close the iTunes software and also disconnect your iPhone / iPad  from the computer. Next copy and paste the IPSW file to the following location:

On Windows:
%APPDATA%\Apple Computer\iTunes\iP{one|ad|od} Software Updates

On Mac:
~/Library/iTunes/iP{one|ad|od} Software Updates

Now plug-in your iOS device to the computer using the USB cable, launch iTunes and click Update to upgrade your device to iOS 5. This time it will directly pick the local .ipsw files and the upgrade should happen without any issues.

You can also upgrade the iOS firmware manually by holding down Shift while pressing the Update but for some reason, this approach always resulted in same 3200 and 3002 errors.

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Some Indian Companies Blocked “Steve Jobs” Related Searches

The inspiring and brilliant Steve Jobs passed away on October 5 and, as expected, people around the world turned to the Internet to read more about this sad news. The interest was so high that “steve jobs” became the most searched phrase on the web that particular day according to Google Trends.

It was early morning here in India but when employees of some tech companies went to Google, looking for news around Steve Jobs, they faced an interesting problem – the corporate web filters blocked their searches. Here’s why:

Apparently, the word ‘Jobs’ was blocked by the corporate firewall to stop employees from searching for jobs in other companies. To discourage staff from finding employment at other companies, the word ‘Jobs’ has been blacklisted.

Ria Sharma says that, due to this keyword-based Internet filtering, employees of Mahindra Satyam, iGate, Cognizant and Genpact weren’t able to search Google or any of the other search engines for news related to Steve Jobs.

Luckily they must have had Internet on their mobile phones that didn’t necessarily have to pass through the corporate firewall.

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