Thursday, May 24, 2007

Hot Trends

So there is this new Google thing called Hot Trends that documents the top spikes in searches every day. So not the most popular, but just the most rapidly popular. Kind of tracks where the cultural moment is. I played with it on Tuesday and there were tons of results for things like "andy and tessa" and "tessa horst" and "the bachelor after the final rose" because, in case you are not aware, the Bachelor's finale was Monday night. (Yes, I sort of started half-watching the Bachelor because my roommate works at the same place as the girl who got second place and who got totally screwed over because Andy Baldwin the "officer and a gentleman" told her that the connection they had was electric and then dumped her the next day for the other chick. And so I half watch at home and then Monday night I was at a friend's house channel surfing and what do you think was on? So I watched.)

This is kind of awesome.

Hot Trends hasn't gotten the best reviews and such (if you google "hot trends" the first link is to an article saying it's "not so hot" - don't you love the ridiculous titles people come up with for news?), but I love how temporary and shallow and stupid it is. How it shows this insane weird web community of people all searching the same things. Everywhere, and on the same day. And to top that off it also shows a great little compilation of news and blog posts and web articles all at the same time, which I find very helpful. Like, today for a while the highest search was, of all things, ancestry.com because they apparently released 90 million war records since 1607 and so you can get all this new data. Of all things! Now, of course, that has been replaced by Azia Kim, the imposter girl at Stanford that I wrote about earlier.

The best thing about it is that it shows that the day that the Office season finale was on, a crapload of people were searching for "Creed thoughts."

Just a little later we have another demographic, the "I like music that plays on Grey's Anatomy" peeps.

Oh, the Internets.

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