Impact of projects is assured by measuring search volumes on more than 10’000 channels, in 200 countries and in 30 languages

Online research often focuses on common channels such as Google or Facebook. The present technology developed by a Swiss R&D institute goes far beyond and applies a new cross and multi channel approach, extracting application programming interface (API) data from 14’103 sources worldwide including search engines (e.g., Wikipedia, Google, Bing, Yahoo!, Ask, Lycos, Alexa, Technorati, MetaCrawler, Search.com, local SE’s etc.), social network platforms (e.g., facebook, Twitter, Linkedin etc.) and e-shop searches (e.g. Amazon, ebay, Alibaba etc.). The collected data is analysed systematically to reveal the queries submitted by internet users and the frequencies of those queries by the domains of 203 different countries. The extracted data show how often the selected keywords have been searched for and how this number varies over time. This happens anonymously, without infringing upon a single user’s identity at any point. It therefore allows drawing conclusions about the population’s online search behaviour regarding the respective keywords without invading the privacy of a single person (fully in line with General Data Protection Regulation, GDPR). This approach is unique because it does not include secondary media information, but rather the active searches by the user community itself, measured by API or software interfaces on the respective platforms, where any kind of search field is offered to any user. The advantage of this method is that there are no interferences between interviewers and interviewees, which is the case in most classical market surveys. In Figure 1 the search volume per data source for the keyword “data science” (search volume measured in Switzerland) is shown. Figure 2 shows the search volume over time for the displayed keywords. Here the search volume is measured in Switzerland. Cooperation is possible in any field of content and in any kind of digitalization or scientific consortia context. The common proactive goal of the cooperation is to measure the “impact” as opposed to guessing. The Swiss R&D institute is interested in research cooperation agreements (e.g. cooperation in the frame of European funding programmes, especially Horizon Europe).