Have you gotten a chance to look at Google Domestic Trends yet? It’s kind of interesting.

It was announced on the Official Google Blog a few weeks ago (Labor day is a fairly minor holiday, but it is NOT letting me catch up.) The site itself’s at http://www.google.com/finance/domestic_trends.

If you’ve ever looked at Google Trends this is going to look familiar — it’s a site that tracks search traffic across specific sectors of the economy like retail, jobs, mortgage, real estate, and so on, and generates charts You get charts against which you can compare individual stocks or stock indexes. (I wish you could also compare query words; wouldn’t it be great to look at the “retail” chart and then trend the search word used over the same period of time?)

Before I start talking about it more just take a minute and look at the computers and electronics chart. Isn’t it terrifyingly regular? I mean, it’s trending lower but the it makes the same shape year after year after year. I thought that was kind of scary.

Many of the other charts do have discernable patterns in them, though they’re not as uniform as the Computers & Electronics chart. Some of them are even trending upwards, like the banking and personal finance chart. With each chart you can enter a stock symbol and get a trend of that stock over time on top of the domestic search trend. You can also look at the graphs for indexes, like the NASDAQ, Dow Jones, and S&P. (You can also chart more than one stock or index at a time if you want to see a lot of information at once.)

I tried several different stocks and sector graphs, but I could not find any two that matched up well against each other. I guess you’re going to have to do some experimenting. This new tool is interesting, but it’d be 100 times more interesting if you could map regular query words onto it in addition to stocks.