Google Checkout Adds Trends

Google is now revealing some seriously important market data via its Google Trends service. Whereas before, Google Trends just revealed search volume, trends that while certainly of interest did not necessarily reflect anything beyond a measure of the internet popularity of a term we now have Google Checkout Trends.
The new Checkout Trends service does reveal important information, namely, the sales data of merchants in Google’s Checkout sales network. This data is extremely valuable and usually hard to come buy; often researchers have to pay firms like the NPD Group a lot of money to know how well their competitors are doing in retail stores; but Google is giving away all the information for free.
Sure, Google Checkout represents only a subset of the entire marketplace, not including any brick-and-mortar stores, as well as thousands of major internet retailers (like Amazon.com, or the websites of Wal-Mart, Target and Best Buy), […]

Original post by Nathan Weinberg