After a long period when Google Trends data was well out of date, the data used has now been updated to include statistics upto and including 6th Sept 2006, and news articles at least through to the end of August 2006.

(You can easily see the exact end date of the statistics by selecting to limit the output just to Sept 2006, and seeing where the line ends, but its harder to judge when the news is current to, since that is only displayed at discrete points).

Ah, found a news item from Sept 4th 2006

http://google.com/trends?q=Steve+Irwin&ctab=0&geo=all&date=2006-9

I also note that even for the extremely common search "de", there are no news results from Belgium news sources... (whether they have been removed, or were simply never included in the first place is unclear).

http://google.com/trends?q=de&ctab=0&geo=BE&date=all

Good catch.

Here's a peak for "Israel":
http://www.google.com/trends?q=israel&ctab=0&geo=all&date=2006

[kiko], with a spike on September 6:

http://google.com/trends?q=kiko&ctab=0&geo=all&date=2006

http://google.com/trends?q=kiko&ctab=0&geo=all&date=2006-9

Thanks Scott – so that shows that the stats and the news are both updated through to the same date.