Devoted to online marketing, viral marketing, and web marketing

Larry Page, left, and Sergey Brin at Google's Press Day

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Google (GOOG) in response to attacks by Microsoft (MSFT) on their core business of search, is launching some new applications that attempt to strengthen that part of the business as they have went of in a number of other areas outside their expertise lately.

The one that could really help online marketers is called Google Trends. This allows users to check out searches for numerous or various market trends within a certain niche. One example is if you do a search for "surfers" it will show specifically that the great majority of searches come from Hawaii and Australia. That and it will also point you to other news story links that reference surfing.

While in this search area the results are obvious, if you're researching a new area of interest or looking to confirm what you think may work, this could be an invaluable tool.

Google Vice President Marissa Mayer said that "For the first time ever, Google is making it possible to sift through billions of search queries from around the world to see what people are thinking about."

Trends is obviously geared toward the online marketing user. My thought is that this could be a tremendous aid to those learning to use this tool properly.

What are some of the things you think this could be adapted to?