Yahoo took a step into the Internet trends space Tuesday with the launch of Yahoo Clues, a service that will provide users with data on popular search terms.

"With Yahoo Clues, you can discover and compare trending information for search terms of interest to you, or explore popular trending search terms on Yahoo," the company said in a blog post.

The beta Yahoo Clues is available via a link from the search results page or on clues.yahoo.com. Once there, you can enter a specific search term in the left-hand search bar or peruse a list of popular Yahoo search terms.

The default view will display results for the last 30 days, but it can also be changed to the last week or day. Data is shown on a 100-point graph, with 100 representing the time over the last month with the highest volume. There are also age, gender, and economic break-downs available.

Yahoo used the TV show "Dancing with the Stars" as an example, and discovered that two-thirds of the people who search for information on the show are women and another two-thirds are over the age of 45. Broken down by age, people in the 25 to 35 age range were most likely to search for information on specific contestants, while those over 65 wanted information about voting and how to find results about eliminations.

Yahoo Clues gets its income information by associating people search with government data on per capita income, Yahoo said. A map view, meanwhile, shows the greatest concentration of user interest. To avoid the most populated areas that always claim the top spots, Yahoo said it factors out relative population differences between states to show a list of the top 10. There is the option to zoom in and out on a particular state for more localized results.

If you want to compare two things - like Windows Phone 7 vs. iPhone - enter the two search terms into the search boxes on the left-hand bar, and Yahoo will display comparison charts.

Google launched a similar service, Google Trends, in 2006.