By Greg Jarboe

In December 2006, The Pew Research Center for the People & the Press released an analysis of ongoing public opinion polls that identifies "What Was — and Wasn't on the Public's Mind" that year.

If you compare Pew's list of the top 10 public opinion stories of 2006 with the lists of top searches in Google News, Yahoo News, or any of the other news search engines compiled by Enid Burns of ClickZ Stats, you'll see that some things on the public's mind prompted news searches and some apparently didn't.

For example, Pew identifies "deepening gloom about Iraq" as one of "the strongest 2006 trends in public opinion." And Iraq is in the list of top 10 news searches at Yahoo News for 2006. But, Iraq is missing from the list of top 10 searches in Google News for the year.

Pew also says, "Gas prices dominated the public's attention -- as long as they were on the upswing." But it didn't make the top 10 lists for Google News or Yahoo News.

So, do top news stories drive top news searches? It appears that sometimes they do and sometimes they don't.

Maybe they are just below the cut off for the top 10 list. Or maybe the users of some news search engines are more interested in "hard news," while the users of other news search engines are more interested in "celebrity gossip."

Or, maybe I should stop speculating and just admit that Danny Sullivan, the editor-in-chief of Search Engine Land is right: The top 10 lists reported by some of the search engines are "heavily filtered."

According to Occam's razor, "All things being equal, the simplest solution tends to be the best one."

In a detailed analysis entitled, "The Lies Of Top Search Terms Of The Year," Danny provides a simple explanation of why the top news search terms for 2006 don't match the top web search terms highlighted in press releases issued by Google, Yahoo, and other search engines.

According to Danny, "The short answer, as Iive written before, is that they are all heavily filtered. That's why you don't see popular terms like 'sex' and 'porn' and navigational queries like 'google' showing up."

If you are trying to figure out which news search terms to use in an online press release or news article, Danny's column also offers an advanced SEO tip that can help you quickly -- and at no cost. He shows you how to use Google Trends to identify news search terms as well as web search terms.

For example, his first chart uses Google Trends to show the relative search volume for bebo, myspace, google, and sex. But, below that, Google Trends also displays a second chart showing the relative news reference volume for the same keywords.

Danny uses Google Trends to show the similarities and differences of other keywords -- including bebo, myspace, world cup, metacafe, radioblog, yahoo, hotmail and amazon. If you use Danny's technique, you can identify potential news search terms, as well.

Of course, I should offer two words of caution.

First, as Google Trends itself says at the bottom of a page of results, "Google Trends aims to provide insights into broad search patterns. As a Google Labs product, it is still in the early stages of development. Also, it is based upon just a portion of our searches, and several approximations are used when computing your results. Please keep this in mind when using it."

Second, there is a lag of about a month in the Google Trends data. So, don't use it to find potential search terms for breaking news. To do this, use either the Google Suggest for Google News or the Yahoo News "also try" feature. They seem to be much more up to date.

Greg Jarboe is a partner in Newsforce. He is also the president of SEO-PR, a search engine optimization firm and public relations agency.