I love hearing about new products from Google Labs, because you never know what’s going to come out of there next. The one I’ll be taking a look at in this article is called Google Trends. From what I’ve seen, it has real potential as a tool for SEO.
You can check the site yourself; just point your web browser to the Google Trends home page. If you’re the sort who likes to read the fine manual before you actually get your hands dirty, you’ll want to check out the frequently asked questions page. You can reach it from a link near the bottom of the Google Trends home page labeled “About Google Trends.”
The Google Trends home page itself looks eerily familiar:
I cropped the screen shot in places to fit it as well as I could, but I think you get the idea. What is this, just another search engine? Well, yes and no. It is a search engine of sorts, but it’s a lot more. What Google Trends does is compare the popularity of searches performed for particular terms – over time, over regions, and over languages.
This might best be explained with an example. As you can see, Google offers several in its little box. Let’s look at skiing vs. surfing (a comparison I cut off). Google says you can compare up to five different terms by separating them with commas, but let’s keep it simple for our first search. Google returns a page that looks something like this:
I’m sorry it isn’t clearer, but it will be in a moment, because I’m going to take each part of this page and dissect it for you. So let’s get started.
Search Engine News 
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