It’s never been so easy to reach into the murky soul of an internet user, grope around a bit in the dirty dishwater of their deepest desires, and pull out a fistful of pretty good impressions about how they see the world.

For example, the Google Keyword Tool

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

was recently modified to give approximate search volumes in numbers rather than the vague green bar charts of old. I’ve spent whole days working out what words people use when they’re looking for cheap flights, sound systems, concert tickets, and online music. The genie is well and truly out of the bottle – at least if Google’s numbers are the honest truth. Other online companies have been offering similar data recently, which may have prompted Google to start publishing its own numbers to take the wind out of the competition’s sails.

Interested in home cinema? I didn’t think so. But 450,000 suckers with cash on the hip and a televisual inferiority complex typed in ‘home cinema’ in June 2008. 90,500 were clued up enough to prefix this with ‘5.1’, while another 9,900 wanted a ‘7.1’ system, which presumably involves some wipe-clean paddles and the Dolby Digital whirling butt-beads.

Marketing departments the world over should be salivating over these intimate revelations of our consumer whims. “How far has our new addition to the lexicon penetrated, Sally?” “Well Brad, 25,000 people typed ‘something to give meaning to my sad life’ last month, but two million searched for ‘something cheap to give meaning to my sad life’ so I guess we gotta reoptimise, dammit”.

Another tool for the budding teleworking clairvoyant is Microsoft adCenter Labs’ Keyword forecast tool

http://adlab.msn.com/Keyword-Forecast/default.aspx

where pretty graphs and ‘audience’ demographic data (age, sex) lie sweetly alongside search volume figures which are a full order of magnitude lower than those of Google for the terms I tested it with. Audience? The term conjures a roomful of popcorn munching sloths, slouched in obeisant awe, with mouse in hand to move the volume slider and little else. I suppose that attitude’s to be expected from a company built on a premise of telling people exactly how they’re going to have it, but which now has to pay people http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070316-microsoft-paying-businesses-to-use-live-search.html to use their search engine.

If you feel like tossing $59 per month into the chocolate biscuit fund of the folks at Wordtracker

http://www.wordtracker.com/index.html

then you’ll be rewarded with some excel spreadsheets, 1997-era clipart graphics, the option to save your searches into projects, region-specific keyword usage reporting, some insight into what keywords your audience associate with blue widgets, and the nagging feeling that you could have got all this information for free elsewhere.

If your problem isn’t telepathy, but rather convincing your boss to change your company website’s keywords from ‘preowned items’ to ‘secondhand toss’ (the latter being what your customers actually type into Google), then Trellian’s latest offering, Keyword Discovery, might be just your cup of tea.  For a subscription fee of $49.95 per month you can stuff the inboxes of your senior management with hard-hitting reports brimming with convincing phrases like ‘core generic offering’, ‘low-frequency population’ and ‘give me a pay rise I know stuff’.

Other offerings from Wordze http://www.wordze.com and Nichewatch http://www.nichewatch.com will help you keep tabs on the competition and see what their SEO consultants have been prodding them with this month. Nichewatch is free (registration required) and kicks up a very useful list of how you and your competitors are doing on the allintitle, allintext and allinanchor stakes on Google. I like it, it’s quick, dirty, and lets you come to your own conclusions.

Like Keyword Discovery however, Wordze.com might as well have been optimised for the phrase ‘give us about six hundred quid a year and you’ll look like you know what you’re talking about in the meeting tomorrow’.