A neat tool that Google makes available is Google Trends which shows you historical statistics on search terms. Wikipedia has a good explanation:

Google Trends [...] shows how often a particular search-term is entered relative to the total search-volume across various regions of the world, and in various languages.

Basically, you can see how popular a particular search string is compared to all the searches run against Google. For example, if you search for "Windows 7", you can see it has become quite a popular search recently whereas "Windows 2000" has died down over time.The topic you are searching has to be a reasonably popular (so unless you have a famous name, trending your name probably will not work), but this can be a great research tool for pop culture analysis.