Google Updates “Hot Searches” With Images & Stories

Google has announced an update to Hot Searches, formerly known as Google Hot Trends. The update gives the page a more magazine look with images from news papers, news stories, related searches, and more. But it appears to remove the ability to search for hot trends by date.

Here is a close up of what the top trending search concept is right now, Apple:

As you can see, the image used is from the New York Times coverage of the WWDC Keynote given by Apple’s CEO. There are also news stories from news sources and related searches that make this a trending search concept. In addition, it shows how “hot” the search is, by showing an orange bar, showing about 500,000+ searches in the US right now. Finally, you can share this on Google+, Twitter and even Facebook.

The previous version of Hot Searches, which always provided 20 daily results, the new page introduces a filtering system that helps Google make sure that the list includes only the truly hottest news stories of the day, Google said. It also aggregates stories and searches better. Google also said the number of searches section is new and shows how many search have been conducted for each topic in the 24 hour period.

Hot Searches are now updated on an hourly basis.

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About The Author

Barry Schwartz

Barry Schwartz a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry can be followed on Twitter here.