The Rob Ford 'crack allegation' story has dominated headlines for the past week. In addition to the salacious nature of the allegations of drug use by the mayor of one of the largest cities in North America, there have been surreptitious meetings between journalists and drug dealers and high-profile references to a secret videotape that allegedly shows the Mayor smoking from what appears to be a crack pipe.

The Mayor's response to the crisis has been anything but textbook crisis communications. For the first week following the allegations, he adopted a siege mentality, stonewalling the media. Then came the unceremonious sacking of the Mayor's chief of staff. And yesterday, we finally saw Mayor Rob Ford read a brief and carefully worded statement to the media and then retreat without taking any questions.

This story is far from being over. But just how big is it? Google Trends helps answer that question. If you're not familiar with it, Google Trends is a tool that shows how often a particular search term is entered relative to the total search volume on the Internet. You can segment it by region, time period, language and so on.

I used Google Trends to display the volume of news searches for the name 'Rob Ford' anywhere in the world in the past 30 days. Since you can compare a number of search terms on the same graph for comparison, I also entered several other popular search terms to provide added context, including 'Stephen Harper' (Canada's Prime Minister), 'Obama', 'Lady Gaga' and 'Hangover 3'. Here's what the results look like:

