Hitwise Intelligence, the blog of British web marketing firm Hitwise, notices that “google earth” is rising in popularity as a search term, and goes on to provide all manner of metrics by which this is the case. Hitwise even digs up some interesting demographics:

Google Earth attracts 70% more visits from the 55+ age category than average for the internet.

Yes, old people apparently love Google Earth. (In addition to you young people, I’d hasten to add:-). And Google Earth users tend to be quite wealthy as well. Or so says Hitwise in their blog post.

One thing Hitwise doesn’t look for, however, is some good news-driven reasons for the timing of the popularity spike that they chart: An early version of Google Earth for Mac was leaked early in December, just when the term’s popularity started growing, and just two weeks ago the software came out of beta and the Mac version was officially released. All these events garnered significant coverage in web-based media, which no doubt translated into downloads.