Writers crafting trend stories - or for that matter profiles, lifestyle pieces, reviews, or even news items - are always desperate to prove the popularity of whatever hot new thing they're identifying. They could do some reporting, of course, or find some statistical research, but instead they're technologically smitten, like everyone else. What's a simpler, or faster, way of quantifying a trend than typing a key word or phrase into Google?

Type in almost any person, place, or thing, and the Google search engine will bounce back to you a neat numerical value of the importance of that person, place, or thing. The writer can sit back and let the search engine's brainy algorithms do all the work - and then pick up some tech-savvy bonus points, too. Google - not polls and pie charts - has emerged as a journalist's best friend, and best source.

Take the Feb. 2 issue of The New Yorker, which features not just one but two examples of reportorial Googling to gauge a subject's popularity. TV critic Nancy Franklin cites Google in her article "L.A. Love" for, of all things, comparing the relative popularity of naked men and women. "A Google search for 'naked men,' " she writes, "yields about 600,000 results; 'naked women' yields more than a million." Ergo, the female body must be more desirable than the male. Case closed. Why? Because Google said so.

Franklin's colleague Michael Specter can't disagree with that reasoning. After all, he relies on similar sourcing in his story "Miracle in a Bottle" to gauge the popularity of the diet drug Zantrex. "If you type 'Zantrex' into Google," he writes, "more than 100,000 citations will appear."

Though he preceded the sentence with evidence and statistics of the drug's increased use, he seemed worried that in this dotcom age, Internet-savvy readers would be left unconvinced without hard search-engine evidence. Scientific studies as proof? Nah. Web searches? Now you've got me.

But it turns out, some of Google's biggest journalist fans are at the Los Angeles Times. In a Jan. 18 article, Times writer Steve Lopez wrote, "I went to Google on the Internet, typed in the words 'Buddhist,' 'bait,' and 'Marina del Rey,' and got a hit." ("Remarkable work, Steve," I can imagine his editors marveling.)

In another January story, the newspaper's magazine ran a feature on sports scribe Frank Deford.

He's a "distinguished writer," claims staff writer Glenn Bunting. The evidence? "A Google search of his name produces more than 21,000 hits." And to prove Audrey Hepburn's continuing popularity a decade after her death, at least one member of the paper's staff got busy last year and did what any brave, new world journalist would do: She Googled "Audrey Hepburn" and found 793 websites devoted to the movie star.

But of course, it's not just The New Yorker and the Los Angeles Times that employ journalists dogged enough to use this aggressive investigative technique.

Mary Carole McCauley of The Baltimore Sun recently wrote that "no other instrument is targeted more frequently than the viola" for jokes. The reason? "Type in the term 'viola jokes' on the Google search engine and you will get 19,700 hits." (Who hasn't heard a good viola joke lately?)

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