Google Trends has just launched UK Hot Topics to complement their excellent trends service. This latest insight is the first ‘pro active’ scoring Google has offered for UK users. To date the Google trends have been available on demand allowing you to search for the trends you are interested in, rather than seeing what is trending. Much like the annual Google Zeitgeist these should give us some insights into the nation’s searching habits.
Like the Twitter Trending Topics that have been in place for some time, the UK topics show what is ‘hot’ right now. As you would expect the key topics today are ‘Obama Banks’, ‘Haiti Earthquake Information’, followed by ‘Australia Open’ and ‘Supreme Court’ indicating that international matters both financial and humanitarian dominate our thoughts and habits today. The top ten is rounded out with ‘Barclays’ appearing, plus MTV, Air America, Jersey Shore, Tooth Fairy and ipl. Just don’t ask me to explain those last few, I am clearly too old for this…
The UK information is still quite limited with only the top ten topics showing and no further trend information to mine from. The USA in comparison offers far greater depth to each trend based on hot searches so we should expect to see this in time as the UK bank of information grows.
Trending Topics is yet another free tool being offered by Google to help people understand and mine users’ searching and clicking habits, adding to the already impressive search insights and website trends as well as the specific adwords keyword tools. This information when coupled with other such sources including Twitter trending topics will further add to the arsenal of information available about what people are talking about and searching for at any point in time across the Internet.
As the size and depth of these trends grow, it will be interesting to see the time lag between talking about a topic (Twitter)and consequently searching for a topic (Google). In the meantime we can be voyeurs over the nation’s searching habits.
[Hat Tip to Vikki Chowney for spotting.]
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