Google goes Trendy

Stephen Withers
Wednesday, 23 May 2007 03:25

Your IT - Home IT

Google's new Hot Trends report presents a list of the 100 fastest-rising search queries among US users, and the results can make strange reading for those in other nations.

Google Hot Trends doesn't show the most popular search terms. Instead, it lists the terms that are showing a spike in popularity - reflecting, in a sense, what's on the collective mind of Americans.

Even if the terms seem odd, there's always a trigger. For example:

"super bowl 2011" - The stadium for the 2011 has been announced.
"kenmore 16237" - Consumer Reports said good things about this outdoor grill.
"gerund maker" - Probably a crossword clue.

Updated several times a day, Google Hot Trends shows a small selection of news, blog and web results for the searches, which may provide an explanation for the surge of interest. Today, the blogs section typically returns posts that list the Hot Trends, which isn't a lot of use, but presumably the novelty will wear off and more useful results will appear in their place.

"The #2 Hot Trends result on Tuesday, May 15th was a cryptic phrase: 'I who have nothing'", said Google officials. "The associated news articles and blog results showed that this is in fact the title of a song that was performed on American Idol that night. And the associated web search results reveal this was originally a song made popular by Shirley Bassey. Mystery solved."

May 15, 2007 is the earliest date for which historical Hot Trends reports are available.

Despite Google's claim that "Hot Trends is Google’s newest tool for users who want to keep their finger on the pulse of what the world is searching for," there is no clear indication that the service will be extended to cover search terms used in other geographies.

The arrival of Hot Trends marks a change to Google Zeitgeist. "With the release of Hot Trends, we're retiring the weekly Zeitgest list, but we will still compile monthly lists for each country, and will continue our annual year-end roll-ups too," said software engineer Corey Vickrey. "Hot Trends is currently available only in English, but we hope to release international versions in the future."

Google has also introduced changes to its Google Trends, allowing reports to be restricted to particular regions within more than 70 countries (eg, states for the US or Australia)