Google Trends provides you with data on the performance of particular keywords in Google search " how many people have been using it to search for particular information.

According to Aaron Wise & Hiroshi Kuraoka in the official blog post, users who search for a particular keyword which is listed in the Google Hot Trends will be shown a graph at the bottom of the search results page which includes information on how popular the query is, how fast it is rising and other data.

Here is an example of the how the results appear:

I see Google Trends as being a way for Google to try to reign in some of the success that Twitter is having with real-time search and this is exactly what Google is hoping for according to RJ Pittman, Googles Director of Product Management for Consumer Search Properties.

Trends is all based on a different kind of tweet. Instead of the 140 character tweet, its the 20 to 25 character tweet, the keyword search. And those come in much faster than tweets do. In our view, thats the highest fidelity information for trending topics.

Google isnt the first search engine to produce this trend feature. Bing has a similar feature called xRank although it isnt featured as prominently on the search results page.

Unfortunately, the new feature is only available for US and Japanese searchers, however I think if it becomes popular then more countries will see the trends integrated into their search results.

Have any of your search queries been a hot trend yet?

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