What do Stone Phillips, dragon skin armor, and Tessa Horst have in common? They are currently the top 3 hottest searched keywords on Google. Google, atop all its nifty services, has come out with Hot Trends, a new feature which is a clever combination of a Google Search, Google Zeitgeist, and Google Trends.

Google Zeitgeist has been around for over six years now; which, is a service used to list the top 10 gaining search queries for the previous week. A couple months back, Google introduced us with Google Trends, an invaluable service used to show trends between selected keywords. * – If you want to try something fun, type in the months of the year or days of the week in Google Trends.(yes, people actually search for Monday on Mondays)

But now, both of these services have been slewed together in a real time view of what’s hot. Google Hot Trends shows the top 100 hottest current searches in real time. A click of the mouse, on any keyword, will take you to that keyword’s page.

The first thing you’ll notice is a meter that shows you the hotness level. The keywords ‘Stone Phillips’ is on FIRE, but others include mild, medium, and spicy. You’ll also get a list of related searches (John Seigenthaler, Lester Holt), the time that the search peaked (12:00 PM, PDT), and the location where the term was searched for the most (New York, NY). The search term ‘Google Hot Trends’ is currently in 26th.

But Hot Trends performs 3 other Google functions, all located on the same page. It performs a Google Web search, Blog search, and News search so you can find out exactly why a search term is hot. Through this, we find out that Dateline NBC has dropped news anchor Stone Phillips to reduce its spending.

Google’s new service also allows you to get a glimpse of the past, as you can change the date to see what was ‘hot’ on a particular day. Hot Trends is currently available only in English, but Ironically, there are some foreign language sites reporting this very same news.

Related:

Entry was posted on Tuesday, May 22nd, 2007 at 2:38 pm under Google, Internet.

Read more entries by George Gardner.
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