Rankings of communities or regions that search for certain terms more often than other places is made possible by a service called Google Trends (trends.google.com).

It analyzes a portion of Google Web searches made over time to estimate their popularity, making best guesses about where queries originate by evaluating the address of Internet servers used by searchers.

Google spokeswoman Heather Laird Spain says Google "normalizes" data by essentially dividing all Web searches for a term in an area by all the overall searches made there — essentially showing how popular a term is among all local searches.

If Google simply counted raw numbers of searches for terms instead, New York City or Los Angeles would top most results because so many searches come from their large populations.

While Google provides data about where individual search terms are most popular, it does not show what the top searches overall are in given areas. Spain says top searches "are usually not very exciting," anyway, and tend to be "the same across the board, namely 'weather,' 'e-mail,' etc."

Of note, Google Trends is still in the early stages of development. "We hope you find this service interesting and entertaining, but you probably don't want to write your Ph.D. dissertation based on this information," its Web site warns.