Let me risk beating a point into the ground: in order to find things when you search you have to use the proper vocabulary. And on the Internet, the proper vocabulary is changing constantly, especially in the arenas of tech and popular culture. SiteVolume, at http://sitevolume.com/, is a nifty little tool letting you know how much vocabulary words are being used across certain social sites like MySpace, Digg, and Flickr.

You can enter up to five words and get a bar graph of how often the words appear on each site. It was interesting comparing the name of Web tools, search engines, and technologies. Especially the word Twitter, which was almost nonexistent some places but which showed up fairly frequently other places (besides Twitter itself, of course.)

The presentation is pretty slick but the methodology behind getting the numbers is pretty simple; it’s a Google search. (You can get more information on the questions and comments page.) If I wanted to do some general searches, but wasn’t sure which keywords to start from, I’d compare their frequency on these sites and perhaps pick the most popular (or the least popular if I was trying to limit my results.) Fun toy.