However, there are still aspects of Google's product suite that provide untold fun to the masses - and we're not talking about its increasingly regular specialist logo designs (once a rare treat, this year we've seen nearly 20 of them already). Google Trends, a feature that lets you enter a phrase and view its search volume, offers both the SEO analyst and the regular searcher hours of fun, comparing the most useful and inane sets of search terms.
Now, Google has added numbers to its Trends graphs, available to view once you've signed into your Google account. Rather than displaying real search volumes in their entirety, the index takes the first term entered into Google Trends as a benchmark average of 1. Subsequent phrases that are entered for comparison are then scaled in relation to the first search term.
For example, a search for 'Sex and the City' on Google Trends spans the years 2004 to 2008:
The average search volume is taken as 1, but the peaks in searches for 'Sex and the City' experienced in 2004 (when the HBO series finally ended) and in 2008 (in the run up to the movie release) reach a search volume index of over 7.5.
Compare this to the search volume for two other hit HBO television programmes, The Sopranos and The Wire.
The search index for The Sopranos (0.25) and The Wire (0.4) are calculated relative to that of Sex and the City (1), the first search term entered. This shows that the search volume for The Wire is higher than that of The Sopranos, despite the search spike experienced by the latter in mid-2007.
Using the drop-down menu under the graph, however, it's also possible to change the term against which search volume index is scaled. Choose to rank the three TV series in relation to The Wire, for instance, and the index changes too.
Better still, users can export their findings from Google Trends into a csv file, with relative scaling or fixed scaling. This includes information on search volume by region, city and language.
The practical application of the new numbers feature on Google Trends will no doubt help industry analysts looking for research on a series of terms at the click of a button. Together with its Hot Trends feature - launched last year and updated on a daily basis - Trends could be the tool in the Google arsenal that revitalises its image as the internet's hottest trend-setter.
