Google Trends is a useful tool for tracking the popularity of a search time over time. Google has now revamped the interface to make it easier to filter those results by country, time or type and added a calendar view of topics that have been popular in the last thirty days.

A new study claims to have discovered patterns in Google search terms relating to finance, which could be used to reveal early-warning signs of stock market moves (it sounds like a 'get rich quick' scheme, doesn't it?). Armed with nothing but Google Trends, canny investors and traders have the potential to anticipate whether the stock market will rise or fall before it happens.

Google Trends has a newly-added ability to show unique visitor statistics for multiple sites—just type in site URLs separated by commas to get rough traffic estimates based on searches and other data. The thumbnail chart here suggests that Apple.com gets a bit more regular interest than Windows or Ubuntu's home pages.