I've been touting Google Trends as a research tool for quite a while; now Google has enhanced Google Trends and created Google Insights for Search. It lets you see patterns of search words or phrases over time and within a specific country and related to a particular subject (I'm not clear on how well it does that last feature).
It's a useful way for researchers to see, for example, which countries may be a good market for a new energy drink, which US states are searching for Barack Obama vs. John McCain or even what parts of Australia are more concerned about the ozone layer.
As with Google Trends, you see not only the relative frequency of search terms but also the frequency of those words in the news -- a nice tool to help you figure out why a particular word was being search on more frequently.
Of course, remember that this only looks for search terms exactly as you type them. This means that, for example, you won't be able to use Google Insights to determine which European country is most interested in hybrid cards, since most of the queries from most European countries will not be in English, so looking only for the search word "hybrid cars" won't retrieve queries from France, Germany, etc.
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