A couple of months ago, Google launched a new trends tool that allows you to compare search trends for keywords. I neglected to post about this launch because, well, Google launches a lot of products. This one seemed somewhat minor. Sure, there’s been some interesting comparisons of words like “the” and “and”, but it didn’t seem like something to use everyday.

My opinion changed about a week ago when I was writing a title for a page involving t-shirts. I wanted to know whether I should focus on “tshirts” or “t-shirts”. As you can see from the graph, “t-shirts” is the more popular keyword. I found it interesting that people had that hyphen so ingrained in them that they typed it in despite human nature to be lazy.

I should have kept digging though, because as the above graph shows, people also prefer the singular “t-shirt” to “t-shirts”.

I’ve never had a real good method for deciding which keywords were the best to optimize towards, but now I have at least one tool to settle some of those debates.