From SearchEngineLand comes a cool piece about Google's new Hot Trends. The feature shows real-time search trends alongside general searches. Google is definitely trying to cash in on the buzz around real time search and I certainly can't blame them for trying.

According to the article, "“The idea behind the [Hot Trends] OneBox is to not only provide you with search results as you’d want but also extra meta data on how popular the search is and whether it has peaked in interest, plus the number of sites that are creating chatter and buzz about this particular topic or person, to give a relative hotness rating as well” said RJ Pittman, director of product management for consumer search properties at Google.""

It returns hot trends on an hourly basis.

This is a very budding area and I definitely expect to see more apps coming out in the near future that seek to make sense of real time search. Google looks like it's trying to take a stab at trending topics on Twitter. For me, I now seem to use Twitter more and more for my general news awareness so this is definitely a fascinating experiment for Google.

I'm definitely curious to see how this plays out.