A pretty interesting article on Google Trends. I played with Trends a few times when it first came out, but didn't think much of it. Don't know why I didn't think of it like this, but it's kind of true - especially if Google provided a few more views and maybe a level or two down on the data.
A FEW years back, a technology writer named John Battelle began talking about how the Internet had made it possible to predict the future. When people went to the home page of Google or Yahoo and entered a few words into a search engine, what they were really doing, he realized, was announcing their intentions.
Mr. Battelle, a founder of Wired magazine and the Industry Standard, wasn't the first person to figure this out. But he did find a way to describe the digital crystal ball better than anyone else had. He called it "the database of intentions."
A few weeks ago, Google took a big step toward changing this — toward making the database of intentions visible to the world — by creating a product called Google Trends. It allows you to check the relative popularity of any search term, to look at how it has changed over the last couple years and to see the cities where the term is most popular. And it's totally addictive....
Warning to Henry Bardi, if he's reading. The above links to the NY Times (All the news that's fit to print).
Approved
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