Google Now Shows Only The Top 40 Searches In Hot Trends

I’ve been using Google Hot Trends for about two years now to keep up with, well… hot trends, and also to give me writing prompts that deliever pretty quick traffic. Google announced on their blog that they are now including trends in search. So if you search for something that happens to be one of the top 100 most popular searches, at the bottom of the page, you’ll see a trends graph such as this one:

Google said that to coincide with the addition of adding trends to the search pages of the popular keywords, they have reduced the number of keywords shown on the hot trends page from 100 down to 40.

I don’t like that, because I feel like people are losing out of 60% of the data. For publishers, such as myself, using Hot Trends is a great way to write about topics that people want to read about at the moment. Without the bottom half of Hot Trends data, people aren’t able to see topics on the rise into the top half of popularity.

What will happen now, is if you happen to search for one of the bottom 60 most popular keywords, you’ll then happen to get a trend graph at the bottom of the page. In my opinion, that doesn’t seem useful at all, and it seems like a very creative way to get out of displaying useful information that was made available.

Google Hot Trends is still cool, but in my opinion, it’s only operating at 40% and that’s too bad. But, in all fairness… with Google Hot Trends displaying the top 40, that still is 30 more than what Yahoo! reveals on their site.

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