Provide your condolences at the Famous Dead website – www.FamousDead.com …

The web is abuzz with fond memories and sadness of his death.  The rate at which the Tweets about him are rolling in provide evidence to that.

Soupy Sales is the number one query on Google’s Hot Trends list.

Soupy was known for his children’s television show, Lunch with Soupy Sales, in which he was frequently received a pie in his face, which became his trademark.

The death of Sales is just the latest in a seemingly never-ending stream of celebrity deaths this year.

In case you are unfamiliar with Google’s Hot Trends, it is a feature of Google Labs that shows you the top terms that Google users are searching for at any given time. You can also search the feature for any query and find how that query has performed for any set period of time over the years. It will show you analytical data on that, including the regions where the term is searched for the most.

Google has also reduced the number of trends on the Hot Trends homepage from 100 to 40. However, the new feature will still reflect the top 100. The feature is available in the US and Japan. Google makes no mention of when it may become available for other regions.

Google’s addition of the hot trends box on results page has already drawn comparisons to Twitter, for the simple fact that Twitter provides its trending topics list. Both features highlight the attention being paid to the real-time web by both users and industry players.

Google has steadily been making changes to its results pages. The biggest change this year was the addition of  "search options." More recently, they increased the font size, and began adding more links based on anchors on pages that have clear sections on different topics (Google tells you how to optimize for that here).

The series premiere of The Office will make its Hulu debut on Friday September 18th, but It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia fans will unfortunately have to wait until Friday September 25th to catch the premiere of the show’s fifth season on the site. Once it makes its appearance, however, I would expect plenty of views (and ad views).

Web searchers are obviously awaiting both of these shows, as they both appear in Google’s Hot Trends list at the time of this writing. "Sunny" is at number 24, surprisingly way ahead of The Office, which is at 93.

Way up at number 8, however, is "thursday night football schedule," indicating what people really want to watch tonight. The only game on tonight is Georgia Tech vs. Miami on ESPN (and on the web at ESPN360.com), but I would expect it to get pretty good ratings, if the amount of web interest in football is any indication.

Last month, football-related sites saw some of the biggest gains in web traffic, as shown by the Compete 250. NFL.com ranked among the month’s biggest gainers, growing 123% and reaching 6.5 million unique visitors, while individual team sites saw tremendous uptick, and fantasy football sites attracted 43.8% more traffic than in July.

Three usually makes a trend in news, but two could be enough of an indicator in this instance. Sunday’s number four gainer in search queries was  ?l?oo? no? ??n?, an apparent Google bomb with more staying power than the aforementioned Nazi symbol.

With the swastika, Google attributed its appearance to a popular online forum posting the HTML. This appears to a similar situation with a weird kind of twist. Clicking on the query in Google Hot Trends brings back Google News and search results for it, and included in those results are articles from Wikipedia and TechCrunch (the sole news source to appear). However, going to read those entries will leave an interested reader disappointed: both are MIA on the sites themselves.

At the risk of helping to perpetuate a self-fulfilling prophecy, gaming Hot Trends to send odd or offensive queries to the top of the list could be the new Rickroll. Stay tuned for more shenanigans, which seem likely.
 

It was out of place for a few reasons. 1.) Obviously, the swastika is now (and perhaps forever) associated with reviled Nazism. 2.) Ironically, its origins are rooted in Jainism, which emphasizes equality and protection of all life—even bugs. 3.) There’s no swastika key on anybody’s Roman-lettered keyboard, unless specially made for skinheads.

The hopes among the few bloggers able to get a screen cap of the Google phenomenon were that the symbol sneaked its way into the trends list via some kind of Asian lettering crossover—the symbol is still used in India-originating religions and as characters in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. Hot Trends showed it on a few blogs, but not anywhere in the news.

It’s also not on the final list for yesterday’s biggest gainers.

Google came through with an explanation, but didn’t identify the source. (Amazing how quickly big companies respond when it involves Nazi associations!) A spokesperson said the HTML for the swastika query was posted on a popular online bulletin board, causing a spike in searches, and thus an appearance on the Hot Trends list.  

Maybe next time somebody will try a smiley or a peace sign. I sense a new trend in the offing. . .
 

And laced in with them were queries like "lake central high school," "district 300" and "school delays" In fact, 88 out of the 100 queries listed were searches for broadcast stations or school closings.

I guess you could say they’re getting a fair amount of snow in the Midwest. The queries themselves reflect where the worst of it is: Chicago, Michigan, Milwaukee, Cincinnati, Columbus, and West Virginia. Down here in Lexington, it’s chilly but mild, so it was a bit surprising to see the extent of the blustery weather directly north.  

Ah, to live in the Almost South. Hope our neighbors are able to stay safe.