Google provides insight into customer concerns

Google Insights can provide "insight" into what's on the minds of electric customers.  The search engine allows Insight users to see trends in search terms and phrases.  For example, the number of users searching the phrase "electricity rates" has been increasing since 2004 as shown in the graph, indicating, perhaps, increasing concern about rising electric rates.  Google Insights also allows for the narrowing of data by specific geographic location, search category, and time frame.  Once a seach term is selected, those geographic regions most active for that particular term are ranked. 

For a more recent trend on a particular search term, Google Insights can narrow the time period to the most recent 12 months, 90, 30, or 7 days, or make comparisons from year to year.  Below is graph of the most recent 12 months.

One should try various seach terms to get a better understanding of customer concerns.  For example, related searches according to Google Insights include the "cost of electricity", "electricity costs", "electricity bill", and "electric bill" just to mention a few.