Google's come out with a neat little tool that I suspect is part of their master plan to take over the universe: Google Trends can show you the frequency of Google searches on any term with enough search volume.

It also shows you the cities where the most frequent searches on that term occur--people in St. Louis inexplicably look for "cream cheese" on a regular basis, and, no surprise, the search phrase "am I depressed?" is searched the most often in England. (Fact of the week: People in Australia seem to be obsessed with funny cats. No one in the US cares one bit about funny cats, it appears. Bonus points to anyone who can explain why this might be.)

The tool is in beta and it has its limitations. The search volume has to be large, so the terms you can look for need to be fairly generic. I'm not convinced of the accuracy of the data, given the way it flatlines in the graph during certain periods, and the frequency with which certain cities show up in the results. And the reporting isn't very granular.

But the potential is there, and with this tool, Google is continuing to expand an incredibly powerful suite of tools for marketers. Between Urchin & Analytics, combined with a more sophisticated level of reporting on search-term frequency with Trends, and the tools that Adwords already offers, they could be close to a turnkey solution for search engine marketing analysis, management, and reporting through Google alone. It would certainly make our lives easier if we had a unified reporting suite that would allow us to generate complex analytics quickly and make campaign adjustments accordingly. If Google continues to dominate online advertising, such a thing is within the realm of possibility. (They'll need to work on their reporting outputs better, though. Anyone who's run an Adwords campaign knows that reporting and analysis is still a slow and too-manual process--the data exists, but the outputs are clumsy, it's hard to combine different data sources, and the usability is prety shameful.)

Anyway, the fun of it is limited by the search-volume issue. I have to believe that someone, somewhere has searched for my name... but Google Trends can't gauge my popularity. Oh well, at least I'm not Britney Spears! From her high in 2004 it's been nowhere but down, down, down. I hear she's big in Mexico, though.