Google Trends offers Today’s Hot Trends. You can see a top-ten list of what is currently being searched. It is not real-time, but the folks at Google say they update it several times a day.

But, there is more. Google Trends has the potential to be another tool for those of you responsible for search terms (keywords) for any web site. You can get a comparison of two terms (separate the search terms with a comma) to see which gets more traffic. Google Trends displays a search-volume graph and a news-reference-volume graph. You may select regions and years to display.

Unfortunately, some of the terms I tried to compare returned this message, “Your terms - search term1, search term2 - do not have enough search volume to show graphs.” Not entirely troubling, though Google has no problem displaying Adword ads for the terms (1,000s of impressions) and collecting for the clicks generated. Oh, well. It’s a freebee tool.

Read everything Google has to say about Google Trends here.

Curiosity or search engine optimization tool? It’s up to you.