Friday, April 30, 2010

Suggest 4 Google Insights - Firefox Script & Chrome Extension

I have written a little greasemonkey script & Google Chrome extension that integrates Google Suggest with Google Insights for Search.

Why do this?
I wanted to speed up some keyword research that I was doing in Google Insights.

There are various research sources I use when doing KW research (such as Google Analytics data, competitor keywords, anchor text keywords, etc...), but sometimes I find that Google itself is a helpful resource for identifying other keyword candidates through its suggest feature. Its suggestions sometimes are terrible but on other occasions it provides insight (no pun intended) into similar phrases that users are using to search Google. After all, suggestions from Google Suggest are based on actual queries from users.












Highlights

  • Suggest results vary by language and country, so I took advantage of the existing country SELECT value from Google Insights to use that as the basis for the country parameter in Google Suggest
  • Since Insights has no language field other than for the whole interface, I decided to add my own SELECT with the available languages (I use the same list as is available for the UI, so it may not be complete for all suggest possibilities)
  • Suggest results are cached for improved performance in the browser
  • Arrow keys on the keyboard work the same as the mouse

Available for Firefox & Google Chrome
Enjoy. As always, please leave feedback in the comments and link to this post instead of directly to the extension and/or userscript. Thanks!