While traffic stats can be a tricky thing, one thing they’re good for is to judge growth trends. According to a new report by web traffic analyst Compete, Google+ saw impressive growth towards the end of 2011.

Google’s social network, which has come under fire since its heavy integration in Google’s main product, search, saw nearly half as many unique visitors as Twitter did in December of 2011.

Compete says that Twitter had 40,411,065 unique visitors during that month, and Google+ had an impressive 20M during the same time-frame.

After seeing a slight dip in visitors in October of last year, it looks like Google+ righted the ship and had a strong end of the year, which is good news for Google since it’s clearly putting all of its social eggs into the Google+ basket.

The below chart shows the traffic statistics for Google+ since Compete started tracking them, which was as soon as the site became public:

In addition to Google+ becoming more popular as a social destination, Compete shares that its +1 feature which is embedded on a variety of blogs and other external sites saw a rise in popularity as well. To grab those numbers, Compete tracked the subdomain for the +1 button, which is http://plusone.google.com, and saw over 40M uniques in December 2011 (the feature was only widely released in November):

While we should all take these numbers with a grain of salt, its clear that Google+ grabbed a solid userbase and continues to trend upwards in popularity when it comes to monthly unique visitors. While the site is nowhere near the traffic that Facebook sees on a daily basis, the company will definitely continue to push the product forward and we’ll be watching.

According to Google, Angry Birds has been the most popular Halloween costume search up until this month. The game is now facing another feathered adversary.

The company shared these hard-hitting insights today, explaining the bird-brained nature of this years Halloween trends:

This year seems to be about the battle of the birds. Searches for [angry birds costume], based on the game phenomenon that has so many of us addicted, have been steadily rising in 2011, and we’re seeing 10 times more search volume this year than last. But as of mid-October, the Angry Birds were overtaken in search by [black swan costume]. The Darren Aronofsky ballet drama seems poised to be the most popular costume idea by All Hallows Eve, with related searches for everything from [black tutu] to [black corset]. Some are even looking to be the alter ego [white swan].

The lure of being an Angry Bird for Halloween can’t be just a kid thing, since most people I know play the game religiously on a multitude of platforms including iOS, Android, and even Google+. However, as Google points out, the serious adults amongst us want to be a Black Swan, made popular by the Oscar-winning film of the same name.

For the kids, it appears as if the big winner of Halloween 2011 will be a pig costume, made popular by the cartoon “Olivia“.

Some other interesting tidbits Google dug up from its trends:

• Everyone has a sweet tooth this time of year, but [candy corn] remains the undisputed king of people’s cravings. In the last 30 days, search volume is nearly twice as high for [candy corn] than for other candy choices
• Per capita, Alabama is searching the most for [candy corn] this year
• Although overall in 2011 [lady gaga costume] leads [nicki minaj costume] in search volume, right now they’re neck and neck

What are you and your children dressing up as for Halloween? Tell us in the comments. Maybe Google trends doesn’t actually reflect which costumes will be worn the most.

The Google Politics team posted about a new initiative today, wanting to get user assistance in spotting political campaign trends.

It has long been thought that political campaigns could be decided long before the actual campaigning and voting process starts, so it’s interesting to see Google dip its toe into this type of analysis.

The team said:

As the campaign season heats up, one of the ways our Politics & Elections team has begun to participate in the conversation is by highlighting some of the more interesting trends from our search data around candidates, issues, and campaigns. One example of a trend we spotted might explain why GOP Candidate Herman Cain is rising in the polls, while Texas Governor Rick Perry is dropping: four of the top 10 cities with the most searches for [Herman Cain] are major cities right in Texas. According to Google Trends, in all of 2011, Cain is rising fast in Austin, Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio.

In asking its users to get involved, the Google Politics team had this to say:

Do you support a candidate in a race? Do you support an issue? Turn to our tools to show that you are part of a larger trend.

We’ll look to feature some of these user-submitted trends over the course of the next year right here on our blog.

Using our tools to spot trends is easy and fun. We encourage you to utilize our Insights for Search tool, Google Trends, the Google Ngram Viewer and even Google Correlate to discover and unearth interesting trends, patterns and connections. Once you find something interesting or newsworthy, drop it into the form below.

It’s great to see Google adopt a social approach in its products overall. Up until the past year or so, we’ve blindly used Google search, Gmail, and Analytics, not knowing what interesting things could be done with the data that we share. With this type of initiative, we’re given a clear idea on how powerful our thoughts, intentions, and opinions are. However, will this affect the way you use the products now you are aware?

And will companies like Google, Twitter and Facebook be able to predict the outcome of a political race one day? With as much information as we share today, it may very well happen soon.

To get involved in Google Trend spotting, jump right in and share your thoughts with Google using the form below.