What is Google Ngram Viewer?

[CommercePundit]

Today, I read very useful blog post on SEOmoz regarding social media search and trends for better keyword research.

I come to know about Google Ngram Viewer.

What is this? I don't get it. Can it help me in my eCommerce website marketing?

[RyanKent]

You can read about Ngram viewer here: http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/ngrams/info

Google has digitized millions of books, magazines and written documents. Each book has a publish date. The Ngram viewer is a query tool which allows you to search for words or phrases over time. You can see the rise and fall of certain phrases, and understand when they became popular or lost popularity.

For example think of "nursing home", "old folks home", "senior care facility", and other similar phrases. By using Ngram you can better understand related phrases or keywords and their popularity.

This information can potentially help with any site by helping to target popular keywords or phrases related to your niche. I would suggest it is more useful for generating ideas. There are other tools better suited for both generating ideas and measuring traffic so in that sense, I would not recommend it for your needs.