Zmarties

Released today in Google Labs, Google Trends allows you to get graphs of search and news volume over time for keywords you provide. (Its thus a great complement to the Google zeitgeist, which shows whats hot over a short period of time).

If you provide multiple keywords, separated by commas, then the graphs are overlayed, so you can compare them. The graphs also have little lettered marker flags, which correspond to particular news stories, so you can sometimes see the reason for a particular peak in the searching. The graphs carry no scale, so you can't see absolute numbers, just trends over time, or in comparison to another keyword.

There are a few interesting examples provided

• Yankees v Red Sox - with a big peak when they were head to head in the World Series (and the winners search volume was twice the loosers)
• major US holidays, peaking as you might expect

and a few of my own examples

• da vinci with a huge peak last year (when Leonardo's birthday was a featured Google doodle), and recently increasing news volume obviously due to the film of The Da Vinci Code.
• olympics with expected peaks for the Greek summer games, the announcement of the 2012 hosts (London), and the winter games
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