Hot Trends - spotting the upcoming searchs and tomorrows news today

The internet is an amazing place you can learn about most anything from carbon nanotubes stopping bullets to a duvet cover. In the last few weeks I've learned a few things over at Google's hot trends page. Basically, about once an hour there is an autogenerated list of the top 100 things people are searching for right now. What I've found interesting about it is to see tomorrows news headlines being searched for today. Several times I've seen searches in the top 100 that I had no idea what it related to until I saw the news the following day, then it all made sense.

I've also made use of the hot trends in deciding which rogue antivirus software is the most problematic at any given time. Google is using this kind of information in a unique way as well. To give a good reading of what flu outbreaks look like. They say that using searches to track a flu outbreak can give about a 2 week advantage over other outbreak tracking methods.

So the bottom line is that if you want to know what people are looking for, google can tell you! (oh and by the way, it looks as though facebook is down this evening judging by the searches...)