I don’t know how or when I stumbled upon Google Labs but no doubt it had to do with the ridiculous amount of time I spend procrastinating on the internet. The website is where those smart boys and girls over at Google get to showcase a few of the new things they’re working on. Some of the more famous graduates of Google Labs include Google Reader, Google Maps, iGoogle, and Google Docs.

One cool utility is Google Trends where you can create a graphical display of common search terms on Google over time. For example, if you type in “climate change, global warming, environment, Britney Spears,” you get a good lesson on what kind of information people really want to find on Google. Some are very predictable, like Nobel Prize , which gets a lot of searches once a year (when the awards are announced every October) but gets searched rather infrequently the rest of the year. And you can plot up the data according to how many searches were made in a particular country, city, or language. Pretty nifty, right?

But my personal favorite is still Google Mars . It’s the same interface as Google Maps, but you can scan over the surface of Mars using elevation data, visible satellite images, or infrared maps. Using the elevation feature, you can easily pick out some interesting features, and most obvious is the largest known volcano in the solar system, Olympus Mons (see it here ). But the coolest thing is that you can see where the various spacecraft have landed on the Martian surface. For example, the Opportunity over is here .

Can you find any other interesting trends? See any easter eggs in Google Mars?

Update: Apparently there is a Google Moon too, with all the moon landings! Thank you Google.