Take close look at online trends with Google Insights for Search

Search and advertising giant Google is taking aim at marketers with a new tool called Insights for Search. Of course, Google Trends already allows you see how different search terms rise and fall over time, but Insights for Search takes things a step farther, allowing marketers (and anyone else) to slice up the data by region, industry or time period.

So, for example, if look up the search term “apple,” you can drill down into trends related to computers and technology, or those related to food and drink. You can also see how computer-related searches and food-related searches compare over time.

The geographic filter is the most obviously useful, since it shows you where different search terms are hot. To test things out, I compared how searches for “venture capital” are doing in California, New York and Washington. And although searches have fallen across the board, I found that  New York seems to be doing the best, and is now neck-and-neck with California.

This kind of information is useful, even essential, to anyone doing business on the web. But Google says the service is meant specifically for marketers, because it can help them design smarter online ad campaigns. That makes sense, particularly since Google isn’t charging for this service, and probably hopes Insight for Search pays off by driving marketers to spend more money on AdWords.