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Looking for the Next Big Beauty Trend? Google Can Help

Search algorithms can reveal what's catching on and what's waning

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Forget the name of the actress who starred in that movie? Google it. Want to know how to get from point A to point B? Google it. Need a to-die-for bean-less chili recipe? You get the point.

Since hitting the Internet in 1998, Larry Page and Sergey Brin's search engine has come on like gangbusters, quickly relegating others (remember Ask Jeeves and Alta Vista?) to the back of the class.

And, Google has diehard fans from every walk of life. As the late, GREAT, Nora Ephron wrote in her essay, "I Remember Nothing," "The Senior Moment has become the Google moment. By handling the obligation of the search mechanism, you almost prove that you can keep up. There's none of the nightmare of the true Senior Moment -- the long search for the answer, the guessing, the self-recrimination. You just go to Google and retrieve it."

Now, people have discovered yet another way that Google can come in handy -- it can predict the future. Well, ok, not in a fortuneteller, soothsayer kind of way but, in a high tech, data processing kind of way.

Folks are using the search giant's algorithms to determine all sorts of things. Which pandemics are most prevalent, which celebrities have the highest Q rating and, yes, which beauty trends are, well, trending.

British Vogue discovered that tweezers are quickly going the way of the Dodo. How'd they deduce such a thing? Seems that since model/actress Cara Delevingne hit the scene in all her glorious Brooke Shield's bushy eyebrow-ness, searches for "fuller eyebrows" have surpassed queries about "eyebrow plucking" and "tweezers" -- both of which have taken a nose dive since November 2012 when Delevingne's spring/summer campaign for Burberry really made people stand up and take notice of all of her assets.

READ: Editors' Picks: 6 Best Eyebrow Growth Treatments

And, in case you were wondering about the state of the economy, according to Google's algorithms, it's not rebounding as well as we'd hoped. While, back in 2001, Estee Lauder's chairman, Leonard Lauder, coined the phrase "Lipstick Index" to explain the "concept of small luxuries, things that can get you through hard time and good ones. And become more important during hard times," and NPR's Adam Davidson recent statement that, "The lipstick indicator doesn't hold up anymore, though nail polish sales now seem to reflect the economy very clearly (albeit inversely). A rise in nail polish sales indicates that we're searching for bargain luxuries as the economy craters -- and sales of nail polish are way up right now," Google proves that the two theories are true. How? Seems that searches for both "red lipstick" and "nail art" are both on the rise.

And, clearly Google -- and all the power it yields -- only continues to rise, too. (Now, if only they hadn't killed off Google Reader ...)

READ: How to Wear Red Lipstick With Confidence

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