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Today, Fresh out of Google Labs, they released Google Correlate.  So you maybe wondering what is Google Correlate and how can it help me?  We're here with some answers.  You may remember a while back, that Google launched their Google Trends app that allows users to type in a keyword and see trending for the keyword in a timeline.  Correlate differs in that it allows you to upload data (in either a timeline format or a U.S. States format) and will find trending topics that match your data set.  Confused?  They say a picture is worth a thousand words so below is a picture:

For simplicity's sake, I took data for Annual Rainfall for U.S. States and uploaded it to Google Correlate.  What I'm looking for are search terms that correlate with this data.  The results were interesting and show a clear correlation.  You'll notice "pink raincoat" was the closest search term used that matched the data points.  So there were similar ratios of people searching for "pink raincoat" according to state, as is the annual rainfall per state.  This makes sense, but what's more interesting are some of those other search terms you might not have expected (remember, this is similar ratio by state).  Pretty neat eh?  As you can see this could become a hugely important marketing and research tool in a companies toolbox, allowing marketers and researchers to gain insight into terms people are searching for based on data collected over time or state.  You can checkout the above google correlate example and read more about Google Correlate in today's blog post.