I just found out about Google Insights for Search today at work. It's pretty cool. Try putting in keywords of various big events/things in the news and Internet memes like tsuanmi, Michael Jackson, numa numa and Lehman and Dubai or crap like prius hummer. Afterwards, I stumbled across its predecessor, Google Trends. Apparently, some people on here know about the latter as we have some old threads on this.
Try these out now that Toyota has been dominating the news (in a bad way): Google Insights for Search Google Insights for Search