Think you’re in the know? You don’t know more than Google or Yahoo! Google today announced the launch of “Hot Trends” as part of its Google Trends search engine. It simply shows what are the hottest queries of the moment. Not necessarily a search voyeur, but collectively what are the hot queries.
Yahoo! has had something similar called the Buzz Index but it looks at the hot queries over the past week. What I like about the Yahoo! Buzz Index is they actually put some context around the search by writing a newsletter that offers some explanation as to why a certain search term is hot (i.e. Celebrity was recently arrested, or there’s a certain food scare).
Similarly, tracking the buzz in the blog space is Technorati’s WTF which stands for Where’s the Fire? What’s Hot and Why. This one tracks hot blog discussions and people can vote a la Digg as to what discussions they like.
In the old days you used to rely on teenagers living in our household to know what was hot. Today, we can rely on Yahoo! Buzz Index, Google Hot Trends, and Technorati’s WTF. It’s like having a whole world of teenagers living in your house, but you don’t have to feed them.
