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Google Trends allows you to review past search trends for specific keywords (up to 5 at once) and also review how many news stories have featured them. Results can be focused by country, and in some cases, data stretches back to 2004. Data is not available for all countries that far back, because of when Google launched country-specific indexes and websites per country.

What's Google Trends Useful For?

In my experience, Google Trends is most useful for:

• Analysing interest in a topic over time

Barack Obama is a classic example - a spike when he was first elected, a long quiet period, and then a build up of momentum as he entered the Democratic nomination race - and some international searches as press coverage grew.

• Comparing search or click volumes to news coverage or other offline events

The deaths of famous people, sporting events etc are examples of this - or the "credit crunch" / "sub prime" events in the US

• Reviewing seasonal trends

For example the decline in finance searches from January onwards in the UK (this graph hides the September increase many finance companies expereince)

• Reputation Management - has a company's name or product brands seen an increase as a result of positive / negative coverage?

Enron, Blu-ray and HD DVD (note the multiple spellings of Blu-ray), the iPhone or toy recalls are all good examples of this

Limitations of Google Trends

It's important to understand the limitations of Google Trends - or you may find you have drawn incorrect conclusions or created a presentation that can be easily ripped apart in meetings (never fun!):

• Data is a few month's behind the current day (its an engineering challenge to record, analyse and then publish this amount of data, so it can't be done daily)
• Data is not available for all keywords; only those with significant volumes
• The time period available varies by country
• The news index is small and mainly US focused (i.e. not very useful)
• The regional data showing the leading cities/regions for an area is in accurate

The last point seems to be because Google tries to geo-locate searches, but often only resolves IP addresses back to data centres or similar telecoms infrastructure - for example it often reports that Bletchley Park (Population: 33,950) is the most popular source of many UK for searches. In fact this is because there is a lot of telecoms infrastructure there, a hangover of the WW2 use of the area for code breaking.

Hot Trends (Google Zeitgiest)

Google has published search trends for several years as the Google Zeitgeist (Yahoo and Lycos have been doing this for even longer). In 2007 they added "Hot Trends", which reports 100 searches in the US. This is not the top 100 overall - that would be dominated by generic words like "cars", "loans" etc - but the 100 searches which have shown sudden surges in popularity - for example because of a news story, event or due to seasonal trends. Hot Trends is a Google labs project at the time of writing, so hopefully it will offer country-specific data in the future.

Google Current

Google also contributes to Current.com (Google Current) and its TV Channel. Current.com, in its own words: "..is the first fully integrated web and TV platform users can participate in shaping an ongoing stream of news and information that is compelling, authentic and relevant to them".