Trends is the latest Google product to get out of Beta. It is a fascinating product, although you only get a big picture. As the name says, it only promises to show you trends, and nothing more.

The power of this tool could be amazing and actually turn into profit-making for Google after a long range of products that simply didn't make it any money (The story goes that its programmers forgot to plan for advertisement for Google News). To understand what I mean by powerful, think of a Toyota determining what US markets it should pursue for its Prius. How about letting Google investigate the issue? Let it find where are the biggest number of searches for "hybrid," "Prius," and "gas prices" coming from. Chances are that those people from those places are likelier to switch. Alternatively, those that don't find Priuses fascinating, there is nothing you can do about them and Toyota better spend its money elsewhere where acceptance of the concept is easier.

Of course, I run a few tests on Kosova. I'm not sure what I was testing though. It looks like searchers of "Kosova" (likely to be Albanian) are much more dedicated with constant following no matter if there is a crisis or not. On the other hand, "Kosovo" (popular in the rest of the world) has a decent base of searchers and then temporary spikes in cases of crisis such as March 2004. As expected, for the second term news volume is correlated to search volume. Probably the most interesting result was the remarkable difference in search volume between "Kosovo" and "Montenegro" when language is Serbian. There was a poll recently in Serbia showing the same conclusion when asked what Serbs care about most. Structure of internet users though has to be takend into consideration when interpreting all results.

Google Trends aims to provide insights into broad search patterns. It is based upon just a portion of our searches, and several approximations are used when computing your results. Please keep this in mind when using it.
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