I'm a n00b at this so forgive if these are dumb questions. Suppose, X happens on TV one day, and you know that people are going to be googling "What is X?" for weeks or months to come. Why not register "whatisx.com? And optimize specifically for the keyword, "What is x?". Is there not enough time to reach the top of the search results? It seems to me that these might be areas of lots of search volume, but much less competition, albeit temporary. Again, I know very little about this, so I look forward to hearing why this is a dumb idea
It's not a dumb idea - and there are some situations where you might be able to rank quickly enough to get some traffic. However I think you'll find that if lots of news organisations are talking about the topic then they'll pretty quickly start dominating the search results and you're unlikely to rank very prominently - news and other media have a lot of ranking power. Plus I don't think many people actually search for the phrase 'what is x' - they're more likely to just search for x.
A lot of people do google in question form, more so for certain types of queries. Does google drop off some of the question words (how, where, what) like it will drop off articles (a, the) unless its in quotations? I've been told this, but it appears that the question words are almost always included in my search results. So, if you could find something you thought a lot of people will be googling, but the news may not be addressing that question directly.... Sounds like a tall order, but not impossible. What else would be needed for this strategy to work?
Oh, another thing, the adwords keyword tool displays the 12 month average for a search term, right? Is there anyway to research more recent or current search quantities? The best I can do is look at the 12 mo avg, and then look at trends and see that it was almost non-existent 3 months ago, and multiply by 4 to get the effective monthly volume. Is there anyway to see number of searches for last month, or yesterday?