Just-in-Time Mind Reading with Google Hot Trends

Have you ever wanted to know what interests your customers right now – to read their minds and find out what hot button you can use to get their attention? Are interested in identifying emerging trends? Google Hot Trends can help you in your quest. Every hour Google updates a list of the hottest 100 topics people in the United States are searching for. You can look at daily lists back to May 15, 2007.

If you are in business, have a website or a blog, Hot Trends offers at least four opportunities.

• Identify topics for a blog or content for a website.
• Identify ideas for new websites and services you can provide, including domain sites you may want to register quickly.
• Identify products to stock for your online sites.
• Use those trends for market research and to connect with your customers.

Google Hot Trends (and Google’s other tools) help me to:

• Understand how others see the world – or at least better understand what they’re interested in. Remember, however, that what is interesting is not necessarily what is important.
• Find examples that readers may better understand. It’s much easier to reach someone if you’re talking about something they are interested in. You don’t use examples from classical music when you’re talking with someone whose only interest is football.
• Gain perspective. Some things just aren’t worth writing about (much less worrying about). When you see a Hot Trend make the list and then fall off within days (or even hours), is it worth spending time on? Compare today’s interests with those of a year ago.

As Greg Sterling said a couple years ago, “These tools, while fun and interesting, are also potentially important as business intelligence and data mining tools and increasingly useful to track the efficacy of offline marketing. Whatever their problems and challenges today, these tools will ultimately improve and become important to marketers as they coordinate ‘integrated’ campaigns across traditional and Internet media.”

Last week I wrote about Google Trends in general. Earlier this week it was about how Google Hot Trends identified an interesting surge in interest in riots following the Lakers’ winning the NBA championship – before the game even ended.

Today let’s dive into Google Hot Trends and consider:

• What Makes a Trend ‘Hot’?
• Why is a Trend Suddenly Hot?
• What Can Hot Trends Do For You?
• Gaming the System – Pranks and the Illegal

What Makes a Trend ‘Hot’?

How does Google come up with this list?It’s not just a list of the most popular searches. That would always give you a list of generic terms like ‘weather.’

Instead, Google measures a spike in interest. Let’s say every day about 1000 people search for ‘Lakers’ (as in the NBA). One day it may be 980 and the next it may be 1025. But overall, there’s a fairly steady pattern of about 1000 people going to Google every day to search for something about the LA Lakers. The change from day to day isn’t all that great.

Suddenly, one day you wake up to find that 1800 people are looking for information about the Lakers. That spike is what Google Hot Trends is looking for. The change in the normal pattern is statistically significant. It suggests that, for whatever reason, people are suddenly more interested in the Lakers.

Businesses want to know when people are interested in something – especially if it’s something the business can provide to satisfy that interest or desire.

Before adding something to its list of Hot Trends, Google filters out ’spam’ and ‘inappropriate’ topics. (It may have learned that from its experience with the swastika discussed later in this article.)

Every hour Google identifies search topics with the greatest change, ranks them, and identifies their ‘hotness level.’ A trend can be volcanic, on fire, spicy, medium or mild. Unfortunately, Google doesn’t let you filter by hotness level. To see how hot a trend is you must click on the link. Likewise, you can’t tell how many of the trends are ‘volcanic’ or where ‘volcanic’ ends and ‘on fire’ begins. As I write this, none of the trends are volcanic.

Based on a random selection of historic dates (clicking on the ‘change date’ link), how many of the 100 trends listed are volcanic varies from day to day. I’ve seen as few as 17 (on June 14, 2009) and as many as 82 (on April 26, 2009). That last number seems very odd – though if you look at the graphs that day, almost every one of that day’s Hot Trends is a single, sudden spike that leaps from no interest to sudden interest and that falls back to zero in an hour or two.

Why is a Trend Suddenly Hot?

It’s nice to know what is hot. But why is it hot? Google doesn’t tell you that. But it does try to give you information so you can figure it out yourself. Each hot trend is linked to a page with a list of news, blog posts and web results related to the trend. This may help you understand why a search is suddenly hot. Here’s the page for “mtu settings” – a topic that was hot on the morning of June 16, 2009 for a brief moment in time.

In the first section [1], you see the primary search term, related search terms, when the trend peaked and, sometimes, the city or geographic area that is causing the spike. The related terms are helpful in seeing what other words or phrases people searched for and that Google grouped to create the trend. These related terms can help you better identify what words people might use to look for a specific topic.

Then you see the 24-hour graph [2]. Sometimes it helps you better understand what’s going on. Sometime it raises more questions – like the question in that earlier article about why interest in riots after the Lakers won the NBA championship was rising even before the game ended.

The news articles [3], blog posts [4] and web results [5] may help you figure out why a particular topic is suddenly of greater interest to many people. It could be something in the news. It could be a mention on Oprah or some other show. It could be that a popular website ran a story. Here it looks like maybe an article in the Jepitu Top Blog may have driven the spike in interest.

What Can Hot Trends Do For You?

Earlier I mentioned 4 ways you can use Google’s Hot Trends.

• Identify topics for a blog or content for a website.
• Identify ideas for new websites and services you can provide, including domain sites you may want to register quickly.
• Identify products to stock for your online sites.
• Use those trends for market research and to connect with your customers.

Michael Arrington in an article last fall suggested that some blogs and media sites use Hot Trends to decide what to write about. When they spot something that fits their interest, they come up with something to say and get it on their blog or website as quickly as they can. Others such as Jaan Kanellis echo that idea.

Here’s the first paragraph of an article on the Geary Behavioural Economics Blog from the Centre for Behaviour and Health at the UCD Geary Institute in Dublin.

Crime Mapping is a Google hot trend that peaked at #3 about 6 hours ago, with 21% of search volume in Los Angeles, CA and 6% of search volume in Montclair, CA. It’s now at #9. Here’s the most recent graph from Google Hot Trends…

If you’re into crime mapping, seeing that your favorite topic has suddenly found its way to the top of the Google hot trend list has to spark at least some desire to quickly write an article. Doesn’t it?

Some let those Hot Trends guide the creation of new content. Andrew Girdwood writes that some blogs “watch the hot trends closely so they can blog a post to match the popular key phrase and try and ride as much of the traffic wave as possible. If you’re shooting to gain some social media coverage then this automated ‘attack’ on Google is a possible way to wriggle your story onto the radar of some influential blogs.”

Of course, there are some whose only goal is to increase traffic to their website. They may take articles others have written about those Hot Trends and put them on their own site. See a page titled Internet Commentary.

What’s the motivation? Is it to tap into what people think is interesting and write about it? Or is it just to get more hits from Google – and make more money? Arrington takes a cynical view and quotes one source who claims to be able to get an additional 30,000 unique visitors every day just by focusing content on topics on the Hot Trends list.

Gaming the System – Pranks and the Illegal

There have been attempts to game Google Hot Trends.

Most of those attempts – at least those reported – appear to be only pranks. The Los Angeles Times reported that last year the swastika symbol (卐) appeared at the top of Google’s Hot Trends list. (Google later removed it.) Wikipedia says that the HTML numeric character reference for the symbol had been posted on a website with a request to perform a Google search for the string. A multitude of visitors to that site did so. Their efforts pushed the symbol to the top of the chart. Another article, a week later, reported on other such pranks.

When does it go beyond a prank? Consider someone who creates artificial interest in a company – or a particular stock. Buy it cheap. Create artificial interest. Watch the price go up. Dump the stock. Now that’s a bad scenario. And it’s illegal.

Is it ‘gaming’ the system to use the information Google offers to identify content you’d otherwise not create? Is it ‘gaming’ to then let Google, because content is ‘hot’, direct more people to your website or your blog?

Consider recommendations on the 800Cart.com E-commerce Blog. It suggests that using Hot Trends to guide content development can move you higher in Google search results. How do you do that?

• Scan the trends page and look for opportunity.
• When you see a connection between what people are interested in (that is, what they are searching for) and what you are interested in, shout it from the rooftops – or at least from your website.
• Notice what people are interested in and then make sure those search terms end up on your website.

The whole idea of search optimization is based on a premise that websites that meet these standards end up closer to the top of search results.

• Sites with the most coherent amount of information on a topic
• Sites with the most relevant and authority links from other websites.
• Sites with the best on-page site architecture (to ensure frequent crawling and indexing)

Here’s what you want to have happen. Google and other search engines begin to notice that your site has content relevant to what many people are searching for. They visit your site more often to index it. Your site starts moving towards the top of the Google search results as more people visit your site. Your site’s page authority increases. Other sites notice your rising page authority and link to your site. That increases your site’s page authority even more and it moves up even further in search results.

There’s a Google Group to discuss Hot Trends – but it seems to be nothing but spam.

You can install an iGoogle gadget and get results as an hourly RSS feed.

Final Thoughts

As I have researched and thought about Google Trends over the last week or so, I couldn’t help but think of Vance Packard’s 1957 book The Hidden Persuaders. Packard wrote about how our thoughts and feelings are manipulated by business, media and politicians. It was the first to expose the hidden world of “motivation research” – a psychological technique that advertisers use to probe our minds in order to control our actions as consumers. Through analysis of products, political campaigns and television programs of the 1950s, Packard shows how the insidious manipulation practices that have come to dominate today’s corporate-driven world began.

While I was writing this article, I was also listening to the audio version of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. You may remember Captain Beatty’s explanation of why society came to ban books.

“When did it all start, you ask, this job of ours, how did it come about, where, when? Well, I’d say it really got started around about a thing called the Civil War. Even though our rule-book claims it was founded earlier. The fact is we didn’t get along well until photography came into its own. Then–motion pictures in the early twentieth century. Radio. Television. Things began to have mass.”

Montag sat in bed, not moving.

 ”And because they had mass, they became simpler,” said Beatty. “Once, books appealed to a few people, here, there, everywhere. They could afford to be different. The world was roomy. But then the world got full of eyes and elbows and mouths. Double, triple, quadruple population. Films and radios, magazines, books levelled down to a sort of paste pudding norm, do you follow me?”

“I think so.”

Beatty peered at the smoke pattern he had put out on the air. “Picture it. Nineteenth-century man with his horses, dogs, carts, slow motion. Then, in the twentieth century, speed up your camera. Books cut shorter. Condensations, Digests. Tabloids. Everything boils down to the gag, the snap ending.”

It’s interesting that while the Internet makes it possible for anyone to write anything and instantly gain a worldwide audience, those who teach about writing for the Internet tell us to keep it short. Use bullets. Don’t make people think.

Good business is finding out what people want and then making it easy for them to get it (preferably from you). Change is the mantra of modern business. Identify needs. Change products and services to satisfy those needs. In that business model Google Hot Trends can help you identify what people want. If you decide those wants (as ‘measured’ by what they are going to Google to find) is something you want to provide, you create the content or offer the product. And then you do what you can to help people find you.

Your thoughts? Leave a comment. Or email me.

Related articles from WalterBristow.com:

1. Does Google Have a Crystal Ball That Lets You Predict the Future?
2. Did Laker Fans Use the Internet to Find Out Where to Join the Riot?
3. Keeping Track of Yourself on the Internet – The Starting Point of Personal Branding
4. 12 Ways to Find an Email Address
5. Google Voice – It Will Change How You Use Your Phone