Google Trends is a service provided by Google to where you can compare the world's interest in your favorite topics. Google Trends also shows how frequently your topics have appeared in Google News stories, and in which geographic regions people have searched for them most.
Google Trends works by analysing a portion of Google web searches to compute how many searches have been done for the terms you enter, relative to the total number of searches done on Google over time. Then Google displays the search results as a graph plotted on a linear scale.
So your intrepid blogger decided to see what was more popular a Smoke Detector or a Smoke Alarm....
The results are interesting....
As you can see from this graph, generally a the term Smoke Detector is a more popular search phrase, with both terms fluctuating roughly in line with each other.
Of particular interest is the regional trends in the search terms, with the term Smoke Detector being overwhelmingly more popular in the United States, Canada and India. Alternatively in Australia and the United Kingdom the search term "Smoke Alarm is more popular.