Google Labs has released Google Trends, which lets you find out how many people have searched for a given term over the past couple of years -- and, more usefully, compare the volumes for up to five terms. Here, for example, I used playstation 3 and xbox 360 as the search terms.
But wait, there's more! The letters on the graph are linked to news stories. D, for example, refers to a story headlined Fans line up to buy new Xbox 360, while F is for Sony to Delay Release of PlayStation 3.
Google also breaks out the results for different cities, regions and languages. This shows, for example, that people in Sao Paulo and Buenos Aires (and in South America in general) are more interested in the PS3 than the Xbox 360. Seattle, Microsoft's home town, is in the top 10 for PS3 searches, but there are many more searches for the Xbox 360.
This should be useful to search engine optimisers, and people in advertising and marketing, who will be able to compare brands over time. For the rest of us, it's just amusing to compare, say, the ipod with the xbox, or blu-ray and hd dvd, or aac, wma, and ogg vorbis, and so on.
But the results may not be accurate -- Trends is only based on a subset of Google searches, choice of term can make a lot of difference, and as with normal Google searches, a lot of the results are probably spurious. But a result like this one is surely saying something interesting....
