Google Trends - what are people searching for?

I was in and out and missed a lot of the Google press day webcast, but I caught a few interesting tidbits. I somehow missed when they talked about Google Trends, but a friend referred me to it (thanks, Peter). Anyway, Google Trends is basically a tool that gives you a peek into search popularity of whatever term you type in. It shows peaks and valleys in search volume as well as cities, regions and languages where that particular word or phrase is popular to search on. It also flags historical news items that might be tied in with spikes in search popularity. So far it looks like a pretty cool keyword search trend research tool. On the main page for Google Trends they give the examples of comparing Skiing and Surfing and major holidays. Here's mine for "Google, Yahoo, and MSN":


Also, as usual, Google had several other new projects up it's sleeve that were announced at the press day. (You can watch the recorded version if you missed it this morning).