Google News? Trends Beta is an attempt to quantify the ebb and flow of activity in the world today, trends revealed in some part through the number of articles available at any given time in the Google News main RSS feed. By summing the number of articles once per minute, taking ten readings at each minute mark to get a decent average for the randomly-generated feed, GNT is able to gain a rough approximation of the activity in the world. More weight per article is given to topics with a large number of articles about that particular topic. You can view the results of this data culling and analysis using the tool you are currently browsing. Defaults have been set for you, but you can choose a complex (includes counts and timestamps) or simple (bars only) view, optimal colors to suit your personal preference, and the time increment the graph should display. Larger time increments tend to show more reliable trends, but come at the price of less data. Some views, such as monthly and yearly, many not yet be available due to the paucity of data collected thus far. GNT Beta is still under development; new features that may be added soon include more in-depth statistics and analysis as well as a larger collection of graph views to choose from.

View It!
http://www.cemetech.net/projects/newstrends.php

Digg it! (Please?)
http://www.digg.com/software/Google_Newst_Trends

Thanks, 'tis indeed.  I noticed a strong uptick this morning, which does indeed correlate to more urgent news.  Hehe.

I'm glad to hear that Google has continued to add more and more features.  You can't really classify it as just a search engine anymore .    

Jon predicts Google surpassing Yahoo, hehehe