Sometimes it’s quite easy to hail any new product or experiment launched by Google, even if the idea behind it is years old and has been practiced by their competitors for a long time.
Take Google’s Hot Trends for example, which was launched yesterday and has thousands of bloggers covering and critiquing the new service which identifies peaks in search term behavior, like a daily search zeitgeist.
Google Hot Trends focuses on the fastest rising terms of the day, throwing out the ever-so-popular terms like MySpace or Sex in an attempt to document in a daily journal type form of what people are interested in from day to day. Each term listed comes with a time of peak, trends chart, and overview of mention on Google News, Google Bog Search and Web Results.
Let’s not forget that Yahoo Search, however, has been tracking daily jumps in search behavior for seven years via the Yahoo Buzz Index.
Yahoo Buzz Index tracks both popular search terms and daily ‘Movers’ which track increases and peaks in search behavior from day to day.
Although Yahoo’s Buzz Index does not do daily archives like Google’s Hot Trends, it does offer search trends by different categories such as sports and television, declining search terms, analysis of data and the Buzz Log which breaks down daily trends and tries to give reasons for them.
And if you want to go beyond Google & Yahoo, the Lycos 50 is an interesting roundup of daily searching behavior across the Lycos network, which has been tracking searches since 1999.
