While Google Trends is currently still in testing mode, it looks as though Google Trends is basically very close to completion. Of course, everything that Google releases is generally in beta for a long time.

Providing a search term receives or has received enough searches in the past, visitors can enter this term into the Google Trends page and be presented with a graphical representation of the number of searches that have been conducted over the past 24 months or so.

While this gives some very useful information on the patterns of particular terms, it unfortunately doesn't provide any actual figures. Whether this will change when Google Trends goes live or not remains to be seen. In the meantime, though, there is some relatively useful information to be found.

Pick a topic relevant to your own site and look at the search trends. If you find that the topic you searched for is depleting in searches then look for alternatives. Of course, be careful to use another tool to ensure that changing is the sensible thing to do.

You can also compare search terms to see which ones are more popular.

You can view how the time of year affect the search volume that certain keywords have.

Alternatively, if you're just interested in discovering the rise or fall in popularity of specific terms then go to http://trends.google.com and give it a try.

Whether this will become one of Google's biggest successes remains to be seen. This is unlikely because the information is mostly used by webmasters and there are many tools out there already that provide more comprehensive information. The good point about this information is that it is probably the most accurate there is.