New from Google: Trends

Google Trends (in Labs) is the company's answer to Nielsen BuzzMetrics' BlogPulse, sort of. The product lets you type in search terms and graph how popular they've been over time. You can also track multiple terms and see their relationsips to one another. The most interesting thing here (besides the fact that it's Google) is the ability to slice and dice by cities, regions and languages, so you can find out, for example, that searches for Tom Cruise are particularly popular in Irvine, Calif. Handy for marketers trying to tap into public sentiment, look at searches on their brand names, etc.