Google has launched a service which tracks the popularity of various search words over time. It acknowledges that it’s only a snapshot of it’s full search traffic, but it’s an interesting tool nonetheless.

If the magazines are to be believed, then innovation is the next big thing in management. If that is true you would expect that searching for innovation on Google would increase dramatically over the last couple of years. Not so. Take a look at this graph which tracks the volume of searches for the word ‘innovation’ over the last couple of years :

While the values of the axis are unknown, and bearing in mind the cliche about statistics and damn lies, it appears that the level of searching for the word innovation has not seen the massive jump that the hype would have you believe. Infact, it has taken a bit of a dip. Of course without seeing what the graph was like in 2000 it’s hard to tell.

However if you look at the number of incidences tracked by the ‘news’ part of the graph, you can clearly see the level of hype increasing.