There are lots of uses for tracking search data, not the least of which is to gauge popular sentiment. When a particular subject is hot it tends to drive more and more traffic to websites based off of keyword searches in popular search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN. If you want to know what’s hot you can take a peek at the top search terms and zero right in on trends in real time.
Google even provides real-time data on keyword trend at www.google.com/trends complete with rankings and ‘hotness’ scale. They even show historical search trends so you can gauge trends as they emerge. Google has also come up with one of the most interesting uses of search trends ever.