Ask HN: What do people of a particular profession search for?

[Terry_B]

Hi guys,

Perhaps a bit of a dumb question...

If you wanted to know what people who work in a particular industry search for on the internet, how would you guys go about answering that question?

Preferrably you'd want to know what they search for in a professional sense, not their own private browsing but both would be useful.

I ask this because I imagine there are market research companies out there with some data but I wouldn't know where to be begin or whether it's worth it. Also there could potentially be other tricks I'm not aware of :)

Or is it all just a matter of brainstorming keywords and researching their search volume yourself?

Thanks!

[secret]

Wow, I had this exact question this morning and was about to post something similar. In my case, the question was: say you know the beginning of a search phrase someone may use and you want to target long-tail variations of it, how could you rank the possibilities in order to start targeting from largest "market" to smallest. In your case, if you knew a keyword that the professional is looking for, I believe our problem is the same one.

For example, say you wanted to focus on wordpress templates. The set of possibilities of what type of template someone may want is open ended. ("Wordpress template for doctors", "wordpress templates fishing website", etc). I've tried using Google's Adword tool, but it doesn't quite do what I need, unless I'm missing something.

Anyone have any ideas?

[sahillavingia]

I'm an iPhone developer and the majority of my searches are:

    1) checking to see if a product idea already exists or is on the way.

    2) market research, would it be viable?

    3) HOW DO I FIX THIS DANG BUG?!

I think that's what most professionals do, just changing the subjects for their respective industries.