Google Trends is a great free research tool to quickly identify possible opportunities. With Google Trends, you can compare the world’s interest in your favorite topics. Enter up to five topics and see how often they’ve been searched for on Google over time. Google Trends also displays how frequently your topics have appeared in Google News stories, and which geographic regions have searched for them most often.

So what?, an initial review of the tool would make you think ‘trends’ is really only useful as a general interest tool and something to muck around with for fun on a saturday night. Evidence of this is with recent media articles like “Kiwis keen to Google bomb recipes” where Google trends reveled that Internet users in Auckland and New Plymouth are the keenest in the world to find recipes for making bombs or that Auckland, New Zealand comes in 7th when it comes to searching for ‘Sex’ on the internet. Great for a laugh, but for not much else. (Be warned this does become addictive.)

Where Google Trends becomes interesting is when observing trends in conjunction with products or services.

When I enter the search string “shoe horn, google trends provided me with the following results.

I imagine if you are a shoe horn manufacturer your eyes must be lighting up about now and you are on the phone booking the first flight to Sydney. If we take the Google trends at face value we can see that Australian are obsessed with shoe horns. And not just any Australians – it is those in Sydney.

Now before you get too excited and start building a shoe horn factory we do need to consider one thing – maybe they are just looking for instructons on how to use it?