A have been looking for a reason to start playing around with google trends and since I should be grading some geography exams now seems as good a time as any. Google Trends allows you to chart historical keyword search traffic based as per Googles uber database of everything.

You can chart the search volume for a single term

or you can compare multiple terms over the same time period.

This makes for some interesting observations. A dramatic increase in search traffic about gas prices in the first half of 2005 wasn’t really matched with an increase in search for a more fuel efficient Prius.

Google trends will also let you define search dates and regions amongst other things. I will try to put up some more examples shortly.

You can also chart traffic on Tecnorati which is basically a blog specific search engine (which is sort of real time)