Hot Trends reflects what people are searching for on Google today. With Hot Trends, you can see a snapshot of what’s on the public’s collective mind by viewing the fastest-rising searches for different points of time. You can see a list of today’s top 100 fastest-rising search queries in the U.S. You can also select a recent date in history to see what the top rising searches were and what the search activity looked like over the course of that day.

Rather than showing the most popular searches overall, which would always be generic terms like “weather,” Hot Trends highlights searches that have sudden surges in popularity. Google’s algorithm analyzes millions of web searches performed on their search engine and displays those searches that deviate the most from their historic traffic pattern. The algorithm also filters out spam and removes inappropriate material.

For each search, Hot Trends shows related searches, a search-volume graph, and the top cities. It also displays news, blog, and web results to help give context about why a search may be appearing on the Hot Trends list today. You can also choose a date in the past to see what the top Hot Trends for that date were.

Google updates Hot Trends hourly.

You can use this tool with your keyword research to determine whether the area you want to go into is a momentary fluctuation or one with a constant history. You can also compare two terms, which helps you figure out pockets of information within a specific niche.

Let’s pick two random niches, such as ‘payroll software’ and ‘carpet cleaning’, and compare them in Google Trends. You can compare up to five terms by separating each term with a comma. To access Google Trends from the VRE Toolbar, type your keywords into the toolbar’s search box and select Keywords > Google Trends.

You can see from the graphs, that the carpet cleaning market (red graph) was quite stable over the past two years, and it’s search activity usually goes up during the first half of the year with peaks in each August.

The payroll software market graph (blue) is smoother, but it’s slowly descending over the years. Although, it still receives enough search volume, it is, probably, not a good choice for niche site building in the long term.

Another piece of valuable information, that we can get from Google Trends, is the top cities, regions, and languages for our keywords. You can see that the top five cities interested in ‘payroll software’ are cities in India, where the software development market is on the rise. The interest in this term is far less in U.S. market.

What other functionality is available?

From About Google Trends:

To see how many searches contained either of two terms, just separate those terms with a vertical bar: “|”. For example, to determine how many searches contained the terms “mittens” or “gloves,” you’d enter mittens | gloves. To compare multi-word terms, use parentheses. To see how many searches were done for either “winter mittens” or “gloves,” for instance, enter (winter mittens) | gloves; otherwise, your query will be interpreted to mean all searches for “winter mittens” or “winter gloves.”

You can also exclude terms from your search by using the minus sign. To see how many searches contained the term “maps” but not “google,” for instance, just enter maps -google.

To restrict your results to only those searches that contain your terms in the specific order you’ve entered them, put your terms in quotation marks. (By default, Google Trends will show you all searches that contain the terms you entered in any order.)

To use Google Trends from the VRE Toolbar, type your keywords into the toolbar’s search box and select Keywords > Google Trends.