Twitter and real time search continues to attract buzz, and Google’s reacting by positioning its “Hot Trends” information in a place where more people will see it, within Google’s regular search results.

Starting around 3:45 Pacific Time today, those searching on topics that are spiking or “hot” in popularity should see a new Hot Trends OneBox near the bottom of the search results page and just above the related search area, similar to below:

Here’s another example:

“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.

From the OneBox, people can then access more information about the topic using the Google Hot Trends service, which was launched in May 2007. (Google Trends itself, the “parent” to Hot Trends, launched in May 2006 and allows people to see how popular many search terms are over time, regardless of how “hot” they are). The boxes show on Google in the United States and Japan.

Hot Trends shows what Google considers to be hottest searches on an hourly basis, searches that many people are suddenly doing. For example, Melissa Gilbert was at the top of the Hot Trends list when I looked earlier today:

Clicking on her name, I can drill in and discover news, blog posts and web results about her. Looking at the news articles in particular, it seems she’s a hot topic today due to her being in a new stage version of Little House On The Prairie:

Why bring Hot Trends into regular Google search results? Pittman said it’s due to the “growth and popularity of real time information.” Places like Twitter allow people to tweet or microblog information within seconds, causing others to turn to them to discover the latest trend in news and current events.

Google realized it has a great source of microblogged content itself, what people put into the Google search box (which recently got bigger).

“Trends is all based on a different kind of tweet. Instead of the 140 character tweet, it’s the 20 to 25 character tweet, the keyword search. And those come in much faster than tweets do. In our view, that’s the highest fidelity information for trending topics,” Pittman said.

What would really make Hot Trends more compelling to me is if there were real time information listed along with the news, blog posts and web page articles shown (see my What Is Real Time Search? Definitions & Players article to better understand what I mean by real time content). Will a “Twitter Results” or “Real Time Results” column be coming? “Not at this time,” said Pittman.

To me, that means Twitter (and to a growing degree, Facebook) will remain a draw for searches where you are seeking immediate confirmation of an event that hasn’t yet gotten news coverage (”Was that an earthquake? “Is the cable out in my area?”).

As part of the new launch, another change has been to reduce the number of Hot Trend topics shown on the Hot Trends home page from 100 to 40. One reason is to help reduce the amount of spam that has sprung up around Hot Trends, misleading or low-content blog posts and web pages created around trending terms in hopes of getting traffic.

“Potentially could be a nice side benefit [spam reduction]. Whenever Google does something like putting together something useful for our users like Trends, these often become targets. We’ve done our best efforts to combat the spam and keep the quality of the list as accurate as possible,” Pittman said.

The main reason for the reduction, however, is to keep those new to Hot Trends from being overwhelmed. Currently, Hot Trends are viewed by people who deliberately seek that type of deep dive into the information. Now, more “regular” searchers may stumble into the area, so Google doesn’t want to “overload” them.

“It’s not that there isn’t value in having a bigger a list, but the bigger the list, the more to wade through,” Pittman said. “I’m not taking that for granted that this is comfortable knowledge for people on Google [what Hot Trends are]. So we’re starting with square one here.”

While the Hot Trends site will only show the top 40 trends for a given hour, the full top 100 list will continue to be used to trigger when a Hot Trends OneBox may show in regular Google search results.

Bing also has a Hot Trends-like service, xRank, launched two years ago this month. But unlike Google’s new Hot Trends OneBox, xRank results remain largely hidden from regular searchers. For example, tebow was the top “mover” in xRank earlier today:

The only way for a regular searcher on Bing to know to explore Tebow’s xRankiness further is if they notice the “xRank” option in the left-hand column, understand what that means, and click on it:

As for Google Hot Trends — watch this space for more, says Google.

“Trends is becoming more relevant than ever. I think this is just the beginning of our efforts in this area,” said Pittman.

For more about Google Trends, see the Google Trends section of our Search Engine Land members library. Here’s also some selected articles:

• Google Meme: Hot Trends Added To Google Trends for more on how it works)
• Google Trends Now Updated Hourly

See also Techmeme for related discussion.

It appears Google has pulled together a bunch of statistics throughout the web and created a small landing page named Google Internet Stats on the Google UK front. The page explains that this service “brings together the latest industry facts and insights together in one place.” Google collected this data from many third party vendors, on a wide range of topics. In fact, you can submit your data using this form.

Here is a picture of the mobile technology internet stats from this tool:

The categories of statistics include: - Consumer Trends – Community – Entertainment – Information – eCommerce - Macro Economic Trends – Rest of the World – UK - Media Consumption – Changes in Media Usage – Demographic Usage – Media Consumption Stats – Media Multi-tasking – Personalised Media Experiences - Media Landscape – All Media – Online - Technology – Broadband – Devices – Mobile – Speed

The current data providers include B2Bonline.com, BARB, BusinessWeek, Coke, Commission of the European Communities, Comscore, Core Metrics, Datamonitor, Deloitte, The Economist, eMarketer, Enders Analysis, Eurostat, Film Distributors Association, Financial Times, Forrester, GFK, Google Insights for Search, Greenbee.com, Guardian, HarvardBusiness.org, Hitwise, IAB, IFPI, IMF, Internet Retailing, Internetworldstats.com, JP Morgan, KMPG, Media & Marketing, Mediascope Europe, Mindshare, Motorola, Net Imperative, New York Magazine, Nielsen, NMA, Ofcom, Opsos MediaCT, PriceWaterhouseCoopers, QuickPlay Media Inc., Retail Week, Reuters, TGI Net, Times Online, TNS, Verdict Research, Wall Street Journal, WARC, YouTube, ZenithOptimedia, and GM.

Postscript: A Google UK representative answered some of my questions, clarifying the following:

• There are no plans to launch this tool elsewhere at the moment. This is a UK-only initiative.
• Any stats submitted by users will be verified by Google’s market research teams
• Google license data from a number of sources, as well as bring together publicly reported facts and stats from the web (sources shown on the site)

Google has an official blog post on this new initiative at their Google Barometer blog.

The Google Blog announced a new trends project named within Google Finance named Google Domestic Trends. In short, Google tracks searches on Google.com and then groups those search volume metrics into industry sectors. Google will then plot the search volume by several industry sectors on a trends graph and allow you to then overall stocks and indices on top of those search volume trends.

For example, I plotted Continental Airlines stock price on Google’s domestic trends index for airline travel:

Google thinks there may be some useful insight into search volume for economic forecasting. For more information, see the Google Finance Blog and Techmeme.

A reader tipped us off to how ASCII art of an airplane is showing up in the number two position at Google Trends. When we first looked ourselves, we thought the image was that of an airplane approaching a landing strip. But a reader suggests it represents a far more disturbing scene, that of an airplane crashing into New York’s former World Trade Center towers on 9/11.

The ASCII image is this ✈ ▌▌. Below, how it appeared on Google Trends:

The “Hotness” level is “Volcanic,” which is hottest level Google Hot Trends can see. The related searches include trends, google trends, bematech, frigorific, google analytic and the geographic source seems to be from Sacramento, CA – at least according to Google’s details. There is currently related no news, blogs or web results for this “search term,” if you will.

This is not the first time we have seen issues with disturbing ASCII art hitting Google Trends. We spotted a swastika in Google trends back in July of this year. Google quickly removed the result and sent us a statement that said it was purely algorithmic and a spike in searches based on it being posted in a forum, caused it to show up in Google Hot Trends.

Google’s official list of the most popular search activity for 2008, aka Zeitgeist, has yet to make its debut, but the search giant has been leaking out tasty tidbits of data to get us salivating for even more search data.

The fastest-rising search terms of 2008

1. Obama
2. Facebook
3. Att
4. iPhone
5. YouTube
6. Fox news
7. Palin
8. Beijing 2008
9. David Cook
10. Surf the channel

These queries have seen the most growth since 2007. It will be interesting to see which ones stick around for 2009, and compare scorecards at that point. Facebook, iPhone and YouTube are the most likely candidates, though Obama could prove to have some staying power. Sarah Palin, Beijing 2008 and American Idol David Cook are most likely to fall off the radar screen.

Holiday gift-giving with Google

In honor of Black Friday and Cyber Monday 2008, Google Base posted the early trends appearing in millions of searches for the most popular gifts so far this holiday season.  In addition to the overall list of popular products, Google reported cold weather apparel including branded searches for “north face jacket” and “burton jacket”, as well as wacky searches for “ugly christmas sweaters” and “dog sweaters”.

Top gift / product searches overall

1. nintendo wii
2. wii fit
3. ipod touch
4. xbox 360
5. nintendo ds
6. ipod nano
7. uggs
8. nikon d90
9. zune
10. digital picture frame

The Google Holiday Shopping guide breaks down more popular gift categories on Google Product Search, including the Top 10 searches for Video Games & Toys, Winter Apparel and Specialty Foods. Bonus savings offers are being extended to shoppers who use Google Checkout at hundreds of partner retailers.

Do-It-Yourself trendspotting at Google

Until the official 2008 Zeitgeist is available, the research tools at both Google Insights and Google Trends are simple ways to look up the popularity of a topic (no matter how obscure), compare web search volume for different personalities or websites over the course of 2008, or a single day or month.

Wondering if it’s just you or if others have the flu, too? Google’s announced a new tool that tells you. Google Flu Trends allows you to see flu activity across the United States.

How’s Google doing this? Is it now indexing actual human beings, in the way it does web pages? Nah. Turns out that when you’re sick with the flu, you search for that word and other flu-related topics. Google can tell which areas are seeing a spike in flu-related searching, and from that, trends can be plotted.

Consider this chart that compares actual flu activity to searches for flu-related terms, over time:

States with more flu activity are shown in darker blue. Click on any state to see the exact level:

Right now, folks in the states of Arkansas, Mississippi, Kentucky, Delaware, Maine and Hawaii are showing “moderate” levels of flu activity. Stop searching about the flu, folks! Step away from your keyboards, have some chicken soup and get back into bed!

When you select a state, above the US map, you’ll see the trend chart change to show you flu activity for that state over time. Flu activity over time for the entire US is shown by default. You can also download data plus enter a ZIP code to find the nearest flu shot location to you.

Postscript: Techmeme has related coverage.

In The Trenches is a weekly spotlight of tips, tricks, and news about the tools search engine marketing professionals use to give them a leg up on the competition. Today: News from the search engines, today’s in-depth look, “Q&A With Google’s Insights for Search Senior Product Manager” and this week’s free tips and tools.

News from the search engines

Google AdWords: Where are your clicks coming from?

Finally! A geographic data report from AdWords. In lieu of being able to serve text ads via your own server (I hope someone is working on this somewhere) and being able to gather this data yourself, AdWords has launched the Geographic Performance report which you can find in the standard Reports tab. This report provides you with an understanding of the geographic distribution of your impressions, clicks, and conversions down to the ad group level. For some of us that aren’t able to gather analytics data from our or one of our client’s sites, this report provides vital data for honing your SEM strategy.

Obviously, there are a ton of ways you can use this data, but primarily, you can use the geographic insights to properly setup your campaigns for location targeting. This is important as many times national campaign bidding could set you at 6th position in a big market like New York, but overbid you in small markets where you don’t necessarily need to be in first position. If you find good trends with this report, you can setup a new campaign and specifically target those areas.

As well, search has always been a great research tool for other media. To me, search volume is one of the best ways to equate interest on a topic…online or offline. Before, to see “penetration” in a market, we had to separate campaigns and location target separately. Now, we can pull this report for this data.

Good job, Google!

Yahoo Search Marketing: Tips for Monitoring Your Traffic

Yahoo’s Traffic Quality is not new, but you may forget about it if you haven’t recently had issues with your Yahoo clicks. This is a really great site and was mainly launched to tackle the fears users were having with click fraud a few years ago. Click Fraud is still an issue, but steps like these taken by the engines certainly helped provide some transparency and helped assured the industry that the engines were trying to do something about it and not just stand by and reap the rewards.

Here are four best practices Yahoo lists for monitoring your traffic:

Use tracking URLs to identify traffic sources. This is a must for any SEM account in my opinion, let alone for monitoring traffic issues. Use either the engine conversion tags or an analytics solution so you can monitor everything happening with your campaigns.

Analyze your traffic. You can’t go wrong here. Watch your traffic at the campaign, ad group, and keyword levels. If you have a keyword that has not been getting any clicks for months and then suddenly starts to click like mad, then there should be a specific reason for that. It might not be click fraud, but you should investigate the source of the traffic.

Take action through account management. You can use your daily budgets to keep a cap on “iffy” campaigns. As well, for Content, the Blocked Domains tool lets you specify sites on which you don’t want your ads to appear, whether they’re competitors of yours, or have products or content that you don’t want associated with your brand. You can block up to 250 domains. These can be an entire domain, a subdomain, or up to two subdirectories per domain.

Submit a click investigation request. If you do see something that may at all be a bit unusual, contact your rep or email Yahoo immediately. In my past experience with these issues, the engines tend to overcompensate on helping because they are so sensitive to their image (and for good reason). The sooner you alert them, the longer record you’ll have when it comes time to compensate. ;)

Microsoft: Getting Started With adCenter

Like a pickup truck owner who everyone calls when they need something moved, even SEM pros will sometimes be approached by friends and family for help. Although not many people ask me for search engine or web marketing help, I have stepped in on occasion to offer the friendly suggestion or launch a simple AdWords account. However, for more in depth engagements, I try to explain how SEM has been set up by the engines as a self-service model that most computer savvy folks can learn on their own.

On Microsoft’s Community site, MSN’s Kristee Bingham has started a series on getting started with adCenter that is a good resource to refer folks to that are just getting their feet wet with search engine marketing. So far, there are three parts: creating campaigns, creating ad groups, and the recently added creating ads. This might be a good series for you to bookmark when you want to reference a start guide to someone.

In depth: Q&A with Google’s Insights for Search senior product manager Elan Dekel

As announced in a previous column, Google Insights For Search launched recently and (along with the revised Google Keyword Suggester with data) I am completely obsessed with this tool. I remember only a year ago felt the need to go over the head of my Google rep to try to get a better understanding about why I couldn’t get search data—especially for my clients’ own branded terms. I felt that Google, a champion of transparency, should open the books and let us see.

Thankfully, Google made the proper course corrections and we have more insight than ever with regards to the largest searched source in the world. I feel like an old man telling some of my younger colleagues about “the old days” (i.e. two years ago) when we relied on poor third party tools (to remain nameless) to project search volume. I still take the complete accuracy of the results with a grain of salt, but that’s what makes the Insights for Search product so great—it shows data and trends, not just data. That way if the data is a bit off (I’m not saying it is, but it could be for many reasons such as browser blockers, IP redirecting, match type issues, etc), I feel very comfortable with using the trend data for directional insights.

Google put on a webinar last week to dive deeper into Insights for Search and I found it very helpful but I wanted to dive deeper for all of you SEM pros that rely on Search Engine Land to be a premiere info resources. So, I was able to track down Elan Dekel in Tel-Aviv, the Senior Product Manager for the tool, and get the real nitty gritty on this great product.

Tell me a little about yourself? How did you come to work for Google, what’s been your experience, and what is your role with regards to the tool?

Elan: I’ve been at Google for about 4 1/2 years. I worked as a product manager on AdWords for the first 3 years. One of the products I launched, that you may have heard of, is the AdWords Editor. I am currently the product manager for Insights for Search as well as a bunch of new products that I can’t reveal yet.

What’s the story behind the project? How did it make it from idea to a working tool?

We had been tossing around the idea of creating an advertiser/pro version of Google Trends for quite a while, as we always realized it contained data that would be extremely valuable for marketers, but for various reasons we couldn’t get the resources to do it. About 18 months ago I moved to Tel-Aviv to be the first product manager in our new engineering center there, and as I was looking around for projects we could take on, I immediately thought of this one. The engineering team we hired in Tel-Aviv were really excited about it. It has quite a wide range of engineering challenges, for example building a very large and scalable back-end that can handle the quantity of searches that people do on Google, and then allow users to do very complex queries over this data, and return these results, in milliseconds.

For a while we considered merging it with Google Trends, but as we wanted to maintain Google Trends as a consumer focused product and to maintain its simplicity and ease of use, we decided to release Insights for Search as a separate advertiser focused product. This gives us the freedom to keep adding powerful advertiser focused features that would simply not be appropriate in a consumer product.

What do you feel is the single best aspect of the tool?

There are a lot of powerful features, the usefulness of the tool is the ability to use them all at once. For example, you can compare the fastest rising searches in the automotive category in New York versus San Francisco. By using category filtering you can do things like isolate searches for “apple” the fruit, from searches for “apple” the computer company. You can pick a query, say digital cameras, and by drilling down you can find the top brands and features that digital camera buyers in France are looking for. You can find new geographies that you can target your products or services to, and find out exactly what search queries you should be targeting in that region, as well as understand how you should position, market, and modify your product offering. This is all incredibly powerful stuff.

Were there any features left out in the first release or ideas that you folks had which you didn’t use?

Sure—there are many. Currently we only show search queries on Google web search results. We hope to be able to allow users to query over our other Google properties as well. In addition, we would like to provide actionable feedback that advertisers can use to improve their campaigns.

What’s been the reaction within Google and with external users about the tool?

We’re very excited to see this tool being adopted by both power users and advertisers alike. Of course, Googlers are some of the power users we had in mind. Its been great to see the many different ways this tool is being used—from advertisers gathering new and upcoming trends to researchers wanting to better understand the growth of social networks around the world. Our chief economist, Hal Varian, has even used it as a way to measure the recession. We hope to continue seeing various Insights being discovered.

What are some tips/tricks that you’d like to pass along to a new user of the tool?

There are few things I’d like people to try out. First of all, definitely use the category filter. Secondly, try doing queries without entering any terms in the search box – this gives you the top and top rising results in the geography, time-range, and category that you selected. Also use the “+” operator. For example, if you want to research the trend for searches on “beer” worldwide, remember that people around the world will be entering the word “beer” in their own language, so you’d want to construct a query that looks something like this: “beer + biere + cerveza + …” You can use Google Translate for this. This is also useful for queries in your own language, for example if there are various ways people refer to your product, you can add them all up in the same way. We have some very helpful examples in our help center and I’d recommend taking a look at them.

Josh Dreller is the Director of Media Technology for Fuor Digital, an agency concentrated in the research, planning, buying and stewardship of digital media marketing campaigns. Josh can be reached at jdreller@fuor.net. The In The Trenches column appears Fridays at Search Engine Land.