David Leonhardt wrote an interesting article about Google Trends titled “The Internet Knows What You’ll Do Next” in the NY Times today. He references John Battelle’s idea of the Database of Intentions that he introduced a couple years ago. The concept is quite simple. People use search engines to find information about things they desire, intend to do, want more knowledge in, etc. Essentially, it’s the person announcing their intentions. If all the searches performed were recorded and then made available through a database, it would represent the intentions of all the people who use the Web…which is so many people that it basically represents all the people in our society.

I had played around with Google Trends just a bit and did find it pretty intriguing. The bummer is that while you get a graph representing the trend, there is no y-axis. In other words, you see relative changes in search popularity but not absolute numbers.

Even still, this data is worth its weight in gold. The data essentially allows you to predict the near-term popularity of anything. In the article, the author references the fact that Google Trends data accurately predicted the order of the top 3 finishers in American Idol last season. An apparel merchant claims to have altered their inventory, favoring one brand over another based on Google Trends data between the two brands.

The big question is, should you have to pay for this data? The Attention Trust guys (of which I am a member) would likely say no. After all, why should a company profit off of you by recording your search behavior? Or atleast if they do profit, they definitely should make the same freely data available to users of the service. My guess is that Google will keep the Trends service free but charge for API access to the data. I don’t believe an API exists yet but you gotta know it’s coming. Businesses from all walks of life could use this data to optimize their operations.

Note: Google Trends could also incorporate Google Checkout data to create the shopping tool that I discussed earlier.