Google offers a simple way to look into people's brains: Google Trends.
You can get basic information about what web users are thinking about annuities by entering "annuities" and seeing how the popularity of that word has varied over time.
You can get even more information by looking lower on the page at the list of "related queries," or queries that users entered around the same time that they searched for the word "annuities."
Google ranks the related queries in terms of how much search activity for those terms is increasing, thanks to forces such as advertising, news articles and economic trends.
Google classifies queries as having dramatically more activity than in the previous period as having "breakout activity." In practice, that appears to mean the searches come up about 10 times more often than before.
Because the number of searches for the related queries tends to be low, the rising query rankings change rapidly. But the rising query rankings can give users a quick peek at the ideas that are bubbling up in people's minds.
We entered "annuities" in Google Trends April 15 and generated a list of the related queries that were much more popular in the last 90 days than during the previous 90-day period.
For a look at the seven queries that came up on top and ideas about what those results mean, see the gallery accompanying this article.
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