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Google Trends has a new section that shows monthly popularity charts for topics like scientists, cars, movies, songs, people, animals, chemical elements and more. Charts are limited to the US for now and they show the most popular things, not the "movers and shakers". Google uses the Knowledge Graph to restrict the charts to real-world things and "measures interest in a broader topic, so it might also count different searches with the same meaning".

"Top Charts are lists of real-world people, places and things ranked by search interest. They show information similar to our Year-End Zeitgeist, but updated monthly and going back to 2004. To check them out, go to Google Trends and click 'Top Charts' on the left-hand side," informs Google.


Google Trends shows information from Wikipedia, links to Google+ or other top search results, the number of months in chart and the previous month's rank.


Google also added a Metro-inspired page that lets you visualize hot searches in full screen. Mouse over the top-left icon to show multiple searches at the same time and click the country name at the bottom of the page to switch to a different country.


{ via Google Blog }

You can now restrict Google Trends results to YouTube. Just like web search, image search, news search and product search, YouTube is a great way to measure people's interest over time.


"Google Trends enables you to take popular search queries and explore traffic patterns over time and geography. Now we've added YouTube search data going back to 2008, making it another great tool to look at video trends. Visit Google Trends and enter any search you'd like and then, on the left, choose 'limit to' for YouTube. You can slice by region or category as well," explains the YouTube Trends blog.


It's interesting to compare web search trends with YouTube trends. For example, [Galaxy] and [Android] are just as popular when it comes to web search, but [Galaxy] is a lot more popular than [Android] on YouTube.

Google has a new interface and a name for the Hot Trends feature: it's now called Hot Searches, it includes fewer searches and fewer links to relevant news articles.

"Hot Searches has gotten a refresh that makes the list of searches more visual, groups related rising search terms together and lets you see more information about those searches," explains Google.


For the first time, Google shows an estimation for the number of searches, so we can find out that more than 500,000 people searched for [Apple] yesterday in the US. For some reason, Hot Searches doesn't integrate with Google Trends and Google shows thumbnails from news articles instead of charts.