Google have taken a big step in real time search by displaying its ‘hot tends’ data in the search results. People who are searching for popular topics will see the trending data at the bottom of the search results page. The little snippet is said to “provide you with search results as you’d want but also extra meta data on how popular the search is and whether it has peaked in interest”.
From the OneBox you are able to click into the result and see more trending data using Google Hot Trends. Hot Trends are searches which Google considers to be the. Hot Trends is what Google considers being the hottest searches and is updated on an hourly basis. At this present time you can only see the OneBox in the US and Japan.
According to Pittman from Google and citing information collected from Search Engine Land the reason for this addition to Google’s search results is due to the “growth and popularity of real time information.” Having real time information is something that the search engines and social networking sites alike are trying to incorporate as there is certainly big business to be made. Twitter would appear to be in the strongest position using their information from micro-blogging and hash tags to display their top trending topics.
Initially it would appear Google had a bit of a mountain to climb in terms of providing up to the minute information. As good as Google’s algorithm is it is a hard stretch to update content minute by minute something which Twitter automatically does. However Google have latched onto something that can work as Pittman also states:
“Trends is all based on a different kind of tweet. Instead of the 140 character tweet, it’s the 20 to 25 character tweet, the keyword search. And those come in much faster than tweets do. In our view, that’s the highest fidelity information for trending topics,”
This is a vey clever move from Google and means that they can compete with social networking sites –in particular Twitter- who certainly have quicker insights into trends. However Google are apparently not stopping there and are planning some new additions in the near future…