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Posted by Corey Vickrey, Software
Engineer

For more than six years, we have compiled a regular list of popular
searches called the href="http://www.google.com/press/zeitgeist.html">Google
Zeitgeist. This has been our way to highlight the sorts of
queries people type into the Google search box every day. More
recently, we unveiled Google
Trends to show the popularity of search terms in relation to
each other overtime, and how different cities or regions may care
(or not) about the trends.

And today we're introducing a new toy we are calling href="http://www.google.com/trends/hottrends">Hot Trends.
It's a new feature of Google Trends for sharing the the hottest
current searches with you in very close to real time. What's on
our collective mind as we search for information? What's
interesting to people right now? Hot Trends will tell you. At a
glance, you'll see the huge variety of topics capturing our
attention, from current events to daily crossword puzzle clues to
the latest celebrity gossip. Hot Trends is updated throughout the
day, so check back often.

For each Hot Trend, you will see results from Google News, Google
Blog Search and web search, which help explain why the search is
hot. For example, the href="http://www.google.com/trends/hottrends?q=creed thoughts&date=2007-5-17">
#7 item on Thursday, May 17th was the cryptic phrase [creed
thoughts]. The associated news stories and blog results show that
this odd term is the name of a fake website mentioned on the season
finale of The Office.
Mystery solved. Of course, some searches are not as easily
explained. Visit the href="http://groups.google.com/group/google-trends-hot-trends">Hot
Trends group to read the explanations of others and offer your
own.

If you want to look further back, you can also see what queries
were hot on a particular day. On Wednesday, May 16th, [ href="http://www.google.com/trends/hottrends?q=melinda doolittle&date=2007-5-16&sa=X">
melinda doolittle], [ href="http://www.google.com/trends/hottrends?q=halo 3 beta&date=2007-5-16&sa=X">
halo 3 beta], and [ href="http://www.google.com/trends/hottrends?q=ge dishwasher recall&date=2007-5-16&sa=X">
ge dishwasher recall] were on the Hot Trends list. If you
don't know why, maybe you'll learn something.

Hot Trends aren't the search terms people look for most often
– those are pretty predictable, like [weather] or [games] or
perhaps [myspace]. Yes, [sex] too. Instead, the Hot Trends
algorithm analyzes millions of searches to find those that are
deviating the most relative to their past traffic. And the outcome
is the Hot Trends list.

In addition to Hot Trends, we've updated Google Trends so that
it's easier to use and, we hope, more useful to you. In
addition to viewing the top search terms by country and city, you
can view the top "subregions" (e.g. states within the
U.S.) across more than 70 countries. You can now compare the
leading href="http://www.google.com/trends?q=hillary clinton, rudy giuliani, barack obama, john mccain">
presidential candidates around the country, for instance, or
find out which states have the worst href="http://www.google.com/trends?q=mosquitoes&ctab=0&geo=US">
mosquito problems.

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.

Hot Trends is currently available only in English, but we hope to
release international versions in the future.

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