Earlier this week Google launched it’s new search feature in its latest attempt at becoming more real-time, and providing its users with information about the hottest current events and topics.
Twitter has become extremely successful over the years, allowing users to microblog or ‘Tweet’ within seconds about current topics, people and events, which is causing others to turn to Twitter to find the most real time information about these subjects.
Google’s latest attempt to compete with Twitter in this field, is the launch of it’s ‘Hot Trends OneBox‘ feature, which is an adaption of it’s ‘Hot Trends’ product that was released back in May 2007. Google hope that this additional feature will make its results more current and more provide real-time information on the most popular and ‘hot’ topics more accessible to all users.
‘Hot Trends’ is a branch of ‘Google Trends‘, which allows users to see how the popularity or level of searches has varied over time for any search term since January 2004. However ‘Hot Trends’ just lists the most popular phrases and top searches for any given hour and allows users to drill down into each phrase and see news, blog posts and web results for that phrase by clicking on the link.
The new feature uses the information from ‘Hot Trends’ and provides the searcher with a graph and other current information about the topic / person in a ‘OneBox’ at the bottom of the search engine results page, but only for searches performed on one of those top-100 hot topics.
The searcher will be able to see how the popularity of the phrase has risen over time and how quickly, and see if the topic’s interest has peaked and is starting to calm down again, or if it’s still continuing to grow and grow. Also users will be able to see the number of sites talking about the subject, to give that topic a relative ‘hotness’ rating.
Some alterations have also been made to the ‘Hot Trends’ feature, as it used to show a list of the top 100 searched terms, however this has now been reduced to 40, but the latest feature will still provide information in the ‘OneBox’ at the bottom of the page for the top 100 ‘hot’ topics.
Google hopes that this latest feature is a positive step to cater to the demand for real-time search results, it has realised it has a great source for finding out what topics / people are current and ‘hot’, and that is it’s own search query box and is now using this resource to analyse what people are looking for and hopefully provide them with the most up-to-date information on that subject.
