Google Trends

I've been looking for a use for Google trends lately, and today Rackspace showed up in the top 10. Apparently the web site outage affected so many people that search interest in the term jumped noticeably for that hour or so. So, I am thankful for the trends site. I was not web browsing at the time of the outage, and it was rather convenient to go to trends and find out about it. I realize the item showed up on the techcrunch blog. Perhaps that is a better solution to my search for technical news, but Google trends seems like a nice general purpose tool.