In September of last year, Google merged Google Trends with Insights For Search into what it called the “new Google Trends.” It’s now been a year and Google is continuing to add more ways for you to follow the latest search trends.
The first addition is an update to the Top Charts that was unveiled back in May. At the time, Google said that its top charts would show you the top searches by region for categories like actors, animals, sports and more. The new feature – Trending Top Charts – adds the option to see the top trending searches in each category.
As an example, here’s the Top Chart for animals. You can clearly see that dogs are the most searched topic overall in the animal category:
Now, switch over to the Trending Top Chart and you see that sharks are now number one. That doesn’t mean that sharks are getting the most search traffic overall, but rather that sharks saw a spike in searches over the last month compared to normal search traffic:
Next up is an update to Google’s Hot Searches list. Previously, Hot Searches would only show you the latest trending searches. Now you can see the which topic gained the most search traffic everyday for the past 30 days. Looking back, you can see that some of the biggest search trends of the past month include Ben Affleck being cast as Batman, Miley Cryrus’ now infamous VMA performance and the announcement of the Nintendo 2DS.
Finally, Google announced that it will be rolling out some updates to its explore page. This is the part of Google Trends that lets you compare search data between any number of search topics. Here’s all the new stuff coming to the feature:
We’ve shifted refinements for countries, categories, and Google products (like Web Search, YouTube, etc) to the top navigation, making it a more consistent Google experience. We’ve also made it easier to discover power tools to compare countries and time ranges.
Search nerds will no doubt enjoy all the new tools Google’s rolling out for power users, but the rest of us have plenty to enjoy with the updates to Top Charts and Hot Searches.
[Image: Google Trends]