(As I mentioned, I am reviewing a couple of online tools to track the popularity of ideas over time. Please forgive this segway away from voting reform issues.)
Icerocket’s blog trends tool is a service to track the popularity of search terms over time based on how many blogs mentioned them recently. Their instructions are simple:
Enter item(s) to see mentions trended over time. Enter up to three queries under Trend Term(s). Type in the label you would like associated with each query under Display Label(s).
They only allow three terms to be searched and graphed at a time.
Here is an example search of “electronic voting machine” vs gerrymandering (click on image to see full chart):
It looks like they support advanced searches of various sorts within the trends search.
One nice feature is that you can click on links to see all blog posts that reference the search query.
Wishlist:
- greatly improve the performance of trends queries
- add the ability to compare more than 3 searches per chart
- clearly state whether users are allowed to save trend graph images and host those images on their own sites.
All About Voting 
Is it better than the google service?
N:
The tools do different things.
I like icerocket’s tool better because I am more interested in what people are posting on rather then what people search for.
I plan to review a few other tools soon.