Google broke out its Insights for Search tool (as well as some other internal sources) to paint a picture of search activity related to the 2010 World Cup.

The World Cup’s 30 days of soccer began on Friday, and there will no doubt be plenty more related searching in the coming weeks. Google Consumer Operations Strategist Jaime Forman-Lau says:

Google has introduced a new feature for its mobile Image Search offering. The feature is "Popular Images," and lets Android and iPhone users browse popular images (go figure).

The Popular Images feature comes in the form of a link just under the search box on the Google Image Search page. When clicked, it brings up a categorized list of image searches and corresponding images.

Google has released an extension of its Hot Trends feature, which brings some of its components to the results page when a user searches for one of the "hot trends." Now when a user’s query matches one of the top 100 trends (or fastest-rising search terms), Google will show them a graph and further information about how popular the query is.

It’s not easy to accurately describe a graph using words.  It’s not enjoyable to read an accurate description, either.  So, perhaps in an attempt to save bloggers and their audiences from either being ignorant or dying of boredom, an embeddable Google Trends gadget has been introduced.

Men take their manhood really, really seriously. It probably shouldn’t be surprising, then, that after McSteamy on Grey’s Anatomy suffered a fractured penis, the Internet lit up with searches for information about the injury as men everywhere asked, “can that really happen?”

Yesterday Google announced its Flu Trends tool, which tracks outbreaks of the Flu. Of course like with just about everything Google does, there are critics, and very often the concerns of these critics stem from privacy issues. This case is no different.

So before the speculation and criticism spirals too far out of control, Google decided to nip it in the bud, and address these things right away. A post at the Official Google Blog says:

I wonder how many people in the interactive advertising industry are feeling suckered by Google this morning.

For the past few years, Google has continually downplayed its threat to ad agencies and marketing technology companies. “We’re not a threat, we just want to help,” tends to be the main theme.

Internet obscenity trials are all the rage these days, what with the recent antics of a particular federal judge in the news. In another such case being tried in Florida, a defense attorney has turned to Google Trends to tell him whether a certain kind of content really "violates community standards."