Google Trends

If you wonder what the hot topics and keywords are in the world today, go to Google Trends. Google Trends tells you the most popular keywords and phrases that people are searching for on the Internet, as well as the search terms that are rising in popularity. You can also compare 2 phrases to see which is more popular. Currently, Google Trends is only offered in English or Chinese, although it computes searches done all over the world.

Google Hot Trends are updated hourly, showing you the most popular search queries in the last hour, day, and week. Hot Trends shows the most common 100 searches performed on an hourly and daily basis. Initially, Google Trends wasn't updated regularly enough to be reliable, but Google seems to have overcome that problem.

Google Labs created and maintains Google Trends, so it's a project still in the first initial stages, and some kinks are still being worked out. When asked about its overall reliability, the Google website says Google Trends gives a good picture of what topics are hot right now (they hope it's "entertaining") but they recommend you don't write your PhD dissertation on the information you get from Google Trends. (So…how about planning your next AdWord campaign? Hmmm…)

Google Labs created Google Insights for Search in 2008, which is a version of Google Trends customized for use by people in the advertising and marketing profession.