While most major search engines have just released their most popular search terms for the ending year, I keep puzzling myself over why search engines do not capitalize and sell their search information as a service.

If you have ever been involved in marketing or promoting a web site online, you know well how search engines and directories play a critical role in determining your online success and popularity.

Any emarketer with some basic experience will tell you that one key tactic to adopt in learning how to promote and phrase your content and page titles on search engines, is to look and seriously analyze server traffic logs. Server traffic logs store information about the visitors that have come to your site and provide you with detailed information about their computer system and their movements and selections on your site.

Such logs can also provide access to search engine referral information, which allows you to see what people have typed into their search engine query box to arrive to your site.

This information can also be extracted and analyzed in real time by utilizing cost-effective live tracking services like Hitbox, Hitslink, Extreme-DM, Coolstats, Superstats, Nedstats and many others.

When you can have direct access to such information some of your marketing job is extremely facilitated by the fact that you can see what users request and in which different percentages they select your offerings. Tools like the recently launched ClickTracks (http://www.clicktracks.com), offer a particularly effective visual approach in providing webmasters with such valuable data.

What would be apparently very valuable to emarketers is the ability to tap into major search engine and directories and find out actual search statistics for whatever selected criteria. As many webmasters and web marketers already spend moderate budgets to pay for services that attempt to provide data that the search engines already have, I wonder why none of them has ever ventured in providing access to such information for a fee.

I myself would be particularly interested in knowing how many searches are recorder daily for a certain keyphrase. I would be keen in paying to find out data about their country of origin, language utilized, and what are the results that get clicked the most among the ones returned for those same searches. I would indeed greatly value knowing how many and which companies are most frequently clicked by users in response to certain queries, independently of their ranking position in search results.

I would love to know their connection speed. I would like also to find out all of the possible term variations that searchers utilize when seeking specific information categories.

Online services like WordTracker (http://www.wordtracker.com) have attempted to provided an alternative approach to this lack of precise data and statistics that we are not getting from the search engines. To sidestep the issue of not being able to obtain the data from the very source where it should be gotten (the major search engines) WordTracker ventured into developing a system that leverages searches and keyword statistics generated on selected meta-search engines (search engines which in turn utilize several major search engines to obtain search results).

Though the results obtained with WordTracker are definitely interesting, they could be of much greater value if they could be extracted directly from Google or Yahoo global search statistics.

By leveraging such enormous and varied traffic flows major search engines are also uniquely positioned to provide technographic and demographic data relating to search queries that would be otherwise impossible to get to. In other words, as I have outlined above, only major search engines could provide me with valuable information that shows relationships between selected queries and country of origin, browser used, operating system and other advanced technical profile data.

In conclusion, major search engines and directories seem to be optimally positioned and equipped to provide free/paid services that would allow users to obtain specific and user-selectable data on actual searches taking place on the Internet.

Just like media moguls, TV networks, radio stations, and advertising agencies pay for national and local auditing systems, I see the information that is in the hands of the major search engines as gold for any sharp online marketer.

To provide us with a Top 10 list of the what people searched the most in the last year does provide interesting socio anthropological and cultural insights but leaves completely untapped an area of information brokering that could provide a win-win opportunity for both users and search engine companies.

Taking into account the difficulty and hardship search engine companies have had to endure to survive and make a profit, it would seem highly appropriate that search engines and directories give a good thought at finding viable models for selling their unique statistical access data to online marketers and promotion firms while freeing us from their disruptive advertising banners

Just like media moguls, TV networks, radio stations, and advertising agencies pay for national and local auditing systems, I see the information that is in the hands of the major search engines as gold for any sharp online marketer.

To provide us with a Top 10 list of the what people searched the most in the last year does provide interesting socio anthropological and cultural insights but leaves completely untapped an area of information brokering that could provide a win-win opportunity for both users and search engine companies.

Taking into account the difficulty and hardship search engine companies have had to endure to survive and make a profit, it would seem highly appropriate that search engines and directories give a good thought at finding viable models for selling their unique statistical access data to online marketers and promotion firms while freeing us from their disruptive advertising banners.