Apples or oranges? Apples definitely win in this match. Some of the headlines that turned up ranged from a health segment (Comparing Apples To Apples: Which Are Healthiest?), to Apples turns down the iPod volume, an article on Apple software that allows iPod Nano users to adjust sound output.

Michigan State Spartans and Michigan Wolverines: which one’s better? Apparently the Wolverines are. However, the top city is East Lansing, with “Spartanburg” a close second.

On the small screen, it’s a neck-and-neck race when it comes to Oprah Winfrey and David Letterman.

If the topics have appeared in Google News stories, the headlines are displayed on the results page and have a corresponding letter on the graph showing when they were originally published. Currently the site provides English-only headlines in the searches, but Google hopes to add non-English titles soon.

The results of time, location and frequency are useful in analyzing what was going on during a certain period of time and what kind of information people were looking for then. ProBlogger’s Darren Rowse makes an interesting point about comparing headlines to their date of publication on the graph and how that might be able to relate to specific events. Rowse believes the tool will be very useful to bloggers wishing to track buzz on their topics over time.

While no individual personal searching data is divulged through Google Trends (the results are from a large sampling), the new feature shows what people are looking for on the whole, and at what frequencies. With such potential to compare and contrast what people are searching for, Google Trends is poised to be a helpful resource to the public relations community.

However, it’s still unclear how the general public will use the search, as Guardian’s Jack Schofield debated in his technology blog. “This should be useful to search engine optimizers, and people in advertising and marketing, who will be able to compare brands over time. For the rest of us, it's just amusing to compare, say, the iPod with the Xbox, or Blu-ray and HD DVD, or AAC, WMA, and Ogg Vorbis, and so on.”