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Google hot trends, with frequent updates

For years, Google has been compiling a list of popular searches it calls Google Zeitgeist, offering a weekly, monthly or annual retrospective look back at what its users wanted to know.

Now, trend-spotting is set to make a scientific turn as Google unveils a service to track the fastest-rising search queries. Google Hot Trends combines elements of Zeitgeist and Trends -- two existing Google products that give a glimpse into Web search habits, but only in retrospect based on weeks-old data.

Hot Trends, a list of the current top-100 fastest-rising search trends, will be refreshed several times daily, using data from millions of Google Web searches conducted up to an hour before each update, the company said. "After we find what trends that are interesting, users will want to know why are they important" Amit Patel, a Hot Trends software engineer and an early Google employee, said.

The experimental service also allows users to select specific dates to see what the top-rising searches were at a given point in the recent past, starting in mid-May. The Mountain View, California-based company is also introducing changes to its existing Google Trends service, which offers charts and other data to see how a trend evolves over time or how it compares to other trends over time.

Now, in addition to viewing the top countries and cities that searched for a term, users can see how search habits around a particular trend vary from region to region in the United States, as well as across 70 different countries. Hot Trends, at http://www.google.com/trends , finds the fastest-rising trends instead of the most-popular topics, which search experts say still centers around sex.

[Via Reuters ]

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