I build monthly niche reports from US Google Trends data. The Pets report and the upcoming Garden & Outdoors one broke my junk filter in a way worth writing down.

The problem: real places that share a topic word

Google Trends' rising related searches for "aquarium" (Pets) were full of places, not products:

"monterey bay aquarium", "shedd aquarium", "ripley's aquarium"

"aquarium restaurant", "columbus zoo"

( More on the aquarium data here. )

For "grill" (Garden & Outdoors) it was restaurant chains: "firebirds", "burtons grill", "carrabba", "eggs up grill", "grill 23".

None of these are niches anyone can sell into. All of them share a word with a real topic.

Why a word blocklist failed

My first filter blocked single words: "lyrics", "tour", "laptop" and so on ( the original filter is here ).…