I recently became aware of the Google Trends tool. This is a really neat way to review traffic volumes over time for certain specific search words and phrases.

You can check the trends of anything, but as an example, let's look at search volume of "windows hosting" and "linux hosting" overlapped for the past twelve months...

What's the value? Well, certainly from a marketing and SEO standpoint there are some fairly obvious values. It's also just satisfies a curiosity. I found it interesting to see that search volume for both terms has dropped slightly over the past year; and interesting that almost twice as many people search for "windows hosting" than "linux hosting".