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and the new main engine page opened up on this specific search term. The page is divided into two sections, Trend History, which displays a graphic graph timeline ranging from 2004 until yesterday. It is paged with the alphabet in descending order of importance from A-Z; these refer to specific News Articles which are featured next to the graph. These News articles range from online newspapers to blogs etc. There is a small link underneath the articles that will lead you to a page of a searchable news articles archive called Google News.

The second section in the Google Trends engine page is Regions; it has three controls, region, year, and rank by. Region and year are fairly self explanatory, but Rank by, is a bit more interesting. If you want to search comparatively, say google trends vs. google, you enter into the main search box: (google trends,google), the comma is your dividing line, you can enter more than one comparison and use phrases too. What will be displayed in the sections is a complete comparison since 2004, of those search terms. In the case of google trends vs. google you will clearly see how google trends are reduced to a low small blue squiggle, in comparison to the overall search on google. To see the different news articles and country comparisons use that small drop down menu, it will show each comparison for separate viewing in the section above it.

Like most search based tools, what you put in is what you get out, you will sooner or later come to grips with what works or doesn't, in association to the topic you want to analyse. I do find the fact you can not see hot trends for any other country but the USA, a little irritating but one hope's this will be rectified in the future. There have also been some reports of Google not updating google trends frequently enough, they do however state on the site that they update hot trends hourly, and google trends monthly. It is a beta product and in development, which does means that one can't rely upon it as the almighty truth, but trends are trends and google does have the largest access to global search trends.

It always pays to cross reference facts and information, apart from getting your facts correct and verifiable; it can also serve as a branching or lateral line of research and analysis on any given topic. In searching the surfer there are a few paths beside Google Trends to follow.

For a quick look at top searches and a couple of other main branches of searching try out Ask.com, go to their

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