Some would call it a natural extension of the search engine, for others; it's a well-tuned skill in trend-spotting. Either way, Google is crafting yet another niche for itself, this time in trend and social culture analysis by unveiling an updated service to track the fastest-rising search queries through the Google search platform.
Called Google Hot Trends, the service borrows heavily from two existing Google data service - Google Zeitgeist and Google Trends - two existing Google products that give a glimpse into web search habits, but only in retrospect based on weeks-old data.
Hot Trends, a list of the current top-100 fastest-rising search trends, will be refreshed several times daily, using data from millions of Google web searches conducted up to an hour before each update, the company said.
For followers of fashion, the latest fads or from a business perspective, those looking to take advantage of the latest topic capturing the social consciousness now have a scientific way to monitor what's hot and what's not.
"There are events going on all the time that most of us aren't aware of happening," Amit Patel, a Hot Trends software engineer and an early Google employee, said in an interview.
From news to gossip, the profound to the truly inane: baffled Google users seek the meaning of the phrase "motion to recommit" in the latest US congressional debate, or search the phrase "Flying the flag" - the title of a very unsuccessful song performed at the Eurovision Song Contest two weeks ago.
Such trend analysis also offers an insight into the way we frequently turn to the web to cheat and bypass traditional learning and revision. Each night before a national US college entrance examination, Google sees heavy searches from what appears to be high-school students making last-minute preparations ahead of the test, Patel said.
For years, Google has compiled a list of popular searches it calls Google Zeitgeist, offering a weekly, monthly or annual retrospective look back at what its users wanted to know.
More recently, this data has manifested itself in the form of Google's vey own TV show, Google Current, which airs on the user-generated content television network Current TV, which is headed by former US presidential candidate Al Gore and is available in the US, as well as in the UK, which gets a UK-tailored version of the channel available via Sky and cable.
As the closest thing Current TV has to a news bulletin, Google Current is broadcast every half hour and provides a look at what the world is searching for on Google. The searches, and therefore the content of the show vary from the serious and topical to the macabre and silly. At the time of writing, the most recent episode was looking at searches relating to cures for baldness.
In contrast, Google Hot Trends updates and automates this process by giving a contemporary snapshot of what is on people's minds - at least as reflected by what goes through Google web search each day.
Each Hot Trends response shows not just links to potentially related sites, but also links to associated Google News stories and blog posts, providing added context.
"After we find what trends that are interesting, users will want to know why are they important?" Patel said. "We are helping you find an explanation: There is some investigation that has to be done by the user."
The experimental service, a breakout technology from Google Labs also allows users to select specific dates to see what the top-rising searches were at a given point in the recent past.
The company is also introducing changes to its existing Google Trends service, which offers charts and other data to see how a trend evolves over time or how it compares to other trends over time.
Now, in addition to viewing the top countries and cities that searched for a term, users can see how search habits around a particular trend vary from region to region in the US, UK, as well as across 70 different countries.
For example, political junkies can track Google search patterns for particular US presidential candidates by state.
