Wednesday, May 23, 2007

Google Reveals Search Spikes

Google Hot Trends is a new exciting feature of Google Trends that Google has recently announced. Hot Trends is a daily monitor of unpredictable anomalies or spikes in search patterns. A search query that suddenly receives a much higher than usual amount of hits would be one featured at Hot Trends. In Google words:

Hot Trends aren't the search terms people look for most often -- those are pretty predictable ... . 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.
The part I like the best about Hot Trends is showing an amalgam of information about a hot query: a graph showing the spike in the number search queries, news articles and blog posts related to the query as well as web results for the query. Makes the idea of mashups resurface again in our minds as a viable hot 'trend' possibly marking the future of the web.

I just hope this list does not become to popular that it would make a loopback effect similar to the one experienced at Google Video due to the presence of the popular videos list.