Google has announced on its official page that there’s a new version of Google Trends available. If you have a Google Account you can now download trend information in CSV format. Very cool.

You can trend multiple search terms. I was curious about a term that’s been bumping around my radar for the last couple of weeks — “hypermiling”. Hypermiling is using various techniques to get the maximum amount of fuel efficiency out of your vehicle — see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypermiler for details. I was curious to see if hypermiling was a recently coined word.

Searching for both words on Google Trends shows that the term hypermiling was being searched even a year ago, though activity on hypermiler is much more recent (and much less.) (The first Google News mention of the word hypermiling was August 2006.) However, when I went and looked at the 30-day graph of activity for these two words, absolutely no Google News articles were referenced. But there are about 112 Google News results at this moment for the keyword search hypermiling!

When I have used Google Trends before I appreciated how much it was tied into Google News, so I’m kind of surprised that there weren’t many references to Google News articles in this newer Google Trends. If you click on the All Dates link after doing a Google News search, you’ll get a graph across the top of the all results page — it would be nice if I could get that and a Google Trends graph on the same page.