Brand Name Search Trends

Google Labs has a very nifty little tools called Trends. It's a search engine that you can type various words or phrases into and then see it's search volume over the last three years. It gives you the option to narrow by country, sub-regions and year. You can type several terms separated by a comma see them compared over time. For the U.S. it will break high volume terms down by state with some cities listed. I typed in various auto makers names to see how they compare, no you cannot get results for individual dealers. I compared Toyota and GM, Toyota and Chrysler etc... and tried some comparisons by make. I tried some Impala, Camry and Impala,Camry, Taurus; you get the idea. The results were not to surprising, Toyota out performed all others, except for Ford. Ford did well in both make and model comparisons, I used the Taurus. This could be some good ammo to use on the manufacturers, what those search volume levels represent is the "lake" you have to fish in at the dealership level. Higher search volume levels represent a higher level of online users looking for the make/model you sell, lower levels represent a much shallower pool to pull from. You can run some of your own comparisons here.