Saturday, August 23, 2008

Google: Britney Isn't Hot Anymore!


- The company updated Google Trends
By: Bogdan Popa, Security and Search Engines Editor

The Mountain View company rolled out a brand new update for Google Trends, the online service that shows you the most popular Google searches. Until now, the service displayed the hot searches for a certain period of time such as weeks, months or years. Now, the new function, codenamed Google Hot Trends, shows even more, refreshing the provided information several times per day. According to Reuters, the service will display the hot searches with one hour delay, meaning that you're now able to view the most popular searches conducted one hour ago using the Google search technology.

"There are events going on all the time that most of us aren't aware of happening. After we find what trends that are interesting, users will want to know why are they important?[…]We are helping you find an explanation: There is some investigation that has to be done by the user," Amit Patel, a Hot Trends software engineer, said according to Reuters.

In the past, the Mountain View-company returned some expected trends concerning the search queries conducted using its technology. At that time, Britney Spears and Paris Hilton were the most popular keywords typed on Google, managing to beat IT-related searches such as Windows or Microsoft. Now, the trends are quite different as the most searched things are "avandia" and "jaclyn nesheiwat".

"Google Trends analyzes a portion of Google web searches to compute how many searches have been done for the terms you enter relative to the total number of searches done on Google over time. We then show you a graph with the results -- our search-volume graph -- plotted on a linear scale," the search giant describes its technology. However, the company shows only the US trends, meaning that it analyzes only the queries conducted from this country.

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