Google Trends: Super Cool Tool for Research

Google has launched a research tool that tracks and compares how many people search a particular term via their search engine.

Google Trends presents results as a graph and then allows you to break down the results geographically.

Anyone in PR should find it invaluable in mapping trends linked to their brand before and after a story breaks, and it should even help come up with sotry angles of interest to the public. Obviously it won't be particularly accurate - it just checks searches made via Google - but it should be a good indicator.

Google Trends Search Engine

And, what's more... It's free