Healthy Fun with Google Trends

We anticipated great things from Google this week, here at the Medgadget home office — but in the end, we’ve been playing around with Google Trends far more than Google Health.
By browsing over the last two years of inquires and archived news stories, you can compare how certain infections preoccupy different areas of the world (or at least, inspire searches and news stories from those regions). You can chart the health fads over the past few years, and chuckle over the annual inquiries about the New Year’s malady. You can even see the daily variations in health needs.
While it’s not quite a research tool (try entering the same term twice, you get slightly different results) and values for the y axis would be helpful, Google Trends makes for a nifty way to scan the zeitgeist, and compare journalists’ tendencies vs. the peoples’ inquiries.
More analysis from SearchEngineWatch
More fun searches from MetaFilter