Google trends, a product in development

Google trends, one of the new beta products of the Google Labs, is a tool that visualises how many times a topic has been searched for on Google. How does it work? "Google Trends analyzes a portion of Google web searches to compute how many searches have been done for the terms you enter relative to the total number of searches done on Google over time. We then show you a graph with the results -- our search-volume graph." Hm, sounds vague. So I tried it out with the topics 'information management' and 'knowledge management'. The result is a beautifull visual which in facts tells me little. It shows that the topic 'information management' is entered more frequently than 'knowledge management'. That knowledge management is not mentioned in Google news over the last three years. At least not enough to show up in Google trends. Right.

So I tried a different one. Ajax and Web 2.0. With the combination of the two topics I hoped to filter out the other Ajaxes, amongst them the populair footbalclub of Amsterdam. Alas, the results are not usable. In the overview of news only one of the six results mentioned the Ajax I was searching for. The rest all linked to news about the footbalclub. Google trends has not (yet?) the capability of building in some intelligence in the search terms. It's fun altough to play with.