eWEEK content and product recommendations are editorially independent. We may make money when you click on links to our partners. Learn More.
Google is making it easier for online users to keep up with the latest people, places, products and subjects that are trending in Google Searches through its new Top Charts feature on the Google Trends Web page.
The company touted the new feature in a May 22 post on the Google+ page.
“Who’s the most-searched basketball team on Google? What pop star is topping the charts in searches? Starting today, we’ve introduced Top Charts in Google Trends to help you discover the most popular people, places and things in more than 40 categories, from movies to sports teams to tourist attractions,” the post stated.
The lists, which are ranked by search interest by millions of users online, will be updated monthly, according to Google. To peruse the lists, site visitors can click the “Top Charts” listing on the left side of the page.
Users can also click on the “Hot Searches” tab to go to a list of the hottest trends at that moment, and they can even click on the special “Visualize” button, which shows the latest trending topics in a colorful visual display.
On May 23, the five top Hot Searches were Amanda Bynes, the Seattle Interstate 5 bridge collapse, the film “Fast and Furious 6,” the Chicago Blackhawks hockey team and Memorial Day.
A wide assortment of more than 40 list categories are featured in Top Charts, including actors, animals, athletes, authors, baseball players, baseball teams, books, cars, cities, colleges and universities, movies, musical artists, politicians, reality shows, retail companies, scientists and more.
It’s an addictive time-waster and argument-settlement site that is sure to make list lovers very, very happy.
The new Top Charts feature is reminiscent of Google’s annual end-of-year Zeitgeist most-popular searches lists that are released each December.
In the most recent compilation in December 2012, the 12th annual edition of the list, Whitney Houston, Gangnam Style and Hurricane Sandy topped the most popular Google searches last year, while other popular topics included the iPad3, Kate Middleton and the 2012 Olympics.
The 2012 Zeitgeist Website included the most popular and hottest trending search terms from around the world in 838 lists from 55 countries. Google added several new features to the Zeitgeist in 2012, including an interactive map that shows where and when some of the hottest terms spiked around the world, and a Google Zeitgeist Android app.
Google also unveiled its annual Zeitgeist video, which portrays clips of the events and people that were the chart-toppers in search for 2012.
To create the lists, Google studied an aggregation of more than a trillion searches that people typed into Google Search over the year and then filtered out spam and repeat queries to come up with the top searches. All the information studied was collected anonymously and included no personally identifiable information, according to the company.
The list also looked at “trending” Web searches, which are searches about hot topics that had the highest amount of traffic over a sustained period in 2012, compared with 2011. Among the top trending searches for 2012 were NBA player Jeremy Lin, who ranked first on the list, and Austrian skydiver Felix Baumgartner, whose free-fall jump from outer Earth orbit ranked him sixth on the list.
The Google Zeitgeist list for 2012 was quite different in 2011, when one-hit Web wonder Rebecca Black, who sang the song, “Friday,” ranked first, followed by searches about Google’s then-new Google+ service. Actor Ryan Dunn, the “Jackass” TV show star who was killed in an auto accident in June 2011, ranked third on that list, followed by Casey Anthony, who was found not guilty in the death of her 2-year-old daughter, in fourth. The release of the first-person shooter video game, Battlefield 3, rounded out the top five last year.