Google has released an extension of its Hot Trends feature, which brings some of its components to the results page when a user searches for one of the “hot trends.” Now when a user’s query matches one of the top 100 trends (or fastest-rising search terms), Google will show them a graph and further information about how popular the query is.
In case you are unfamiliar with Google’s Hot Trends, it is a feature of Google Labs that shows you the top terms that Google users are searching for at any given time. You can also search the feature for any query and find how that query has performed for any set period of time over the years. It will show you analytical data on that, including the regions where the term is searched for the most.
Google has also reduced the number of trends on the Hot Trends homepage from 100 to 40. However, the new feature will still reflect the top 100. The feature is available in the US and Japan. Google makes no mention of when it may become available for other regions.
Google’s addition of the hot trends box on results page has already drawn comparisons to Twitter, for the simple fact that Twitter provides its trending topics list. Both features highlight the attention being paid to the real-time web by both users and industry players.
Google has steadily been making changes to its results pages. The biggest change this year was the addition of “search options.” More recently, they increased the font size, and began adding more links based on anchors on pages that have clear sections on different topics (Google tells you how to optimize for that here).
