Google Trends Hottrends (Hot Trends) truncated to 40?
Interesting – it looks as though Google may be limiting the number of results in their hottrends search page to just 40 now from the 100 that they used to. I’m not very surprised really…. in the last few weeks I’ve been using the hottrends to see which rogue antivirus was the biggest pain in the neck of the moment, but in doing so I see many rogue sites that are using the hot trends to cash in on the traffic by serving up malware. At one point 6 of the top 10 sites in the results for one of the rogue applications were malware and I’ve seen malware served up from sites that weren’t computer related searches either. I’ve seen one person speculate that it’s based on search volume and they trim it to 40 when there are fewer searches being made. Maybe it is a temporary change.
I just suspect they figure there’s less of a chance for it to be gamed if they give out a bit less information. Despite that it’s been fascinating to watch the hottrends. (I’ve even spotted a number of news stories developing there WELL before seeing it on the cable news networks.) So, what are your thoughts? Should they trim it down to cut abuse? Should they expand it? (Should they give us the option to seeing the top x queries where we can specify however many queries to browse?) What do you think?
By the way – similar services are Yahoo’s Buzz which only shows the top 20 searches, but can show you the searches by category. Listing of this and other similar services at searchenginewatch. Another here at about.com. ask.com
I’ve seen some updated information that ties this shrinkage of the hot trends to a tie in with google search. Apparently on the hot trending topics google is now introducing a box with the trend information, related search etc. Cutting the number to forty officially is to avoid overwhelming users that are new to the information (although the article said the box would show up for the top 100 searches anyway….) and a “side effect” is going to be thinning out some of the spam that chase trends. I’ve seen MANY pages that do nothing but take rss feeds of the trends on a page and the way their algorithm works for “QDF” (*query deserves freshness) when a search is that hot it will ring in new “chatter” on the topic which usually includes these rss feed splogs as well as many keyword stuffing pages designed to target nothing but the volume traffic. (No content on the topic – kind of a web based bait and switch.) This is typical of the rogue antivirus scammers that were throwing up pages that in the search results appeared to have information on a top search term, but redirected to their “scan” and suggestions that your computer is infected with blah blah blah – please download and install “our scam software of the day” and pay us to remove the problem…. Unfortunately that will still take place, there will just be fewer search results for the scammers to target.
Anyway…
Other places to see trending searches…
Bing has xrank which is similar and you can dig deeper than 100. Here’s an interesting take on pulling up bing search results for the google top 40 trend searches.