I put up a post a couple of days back about the Google Trends tool which enables you to chart the popularity of search terms over time. It’s a little on the geeky side, but as I said in the post I think it’s a fascinating glimpse into the mood of the earth’s inhabitants. To be able to witness what the citizens of the blue planet are privately typing into the ether is a brave new dawn for sociological research.
Google have had hot search tables available for a while where you can see, for example, which type of food is being searched the most, or which basketball player or species of animal is trending. Now they’ve produced a real time Hot Search visualisation, and it’s hypnotic.
It shows globally, in real time, what’s going on in the minds of internet users at any given second. It looks as if the search terms are being typed in in real time but they aren’t I’m sure. It seems that it’s probably fairly heavily edited, for instance there’s no swears or rudies. And the spelling is immaculate. But it’s still a fascinating and mesmerising thing to look at. You can click on any of the terms that come up and see what the chatter is all about. For instance this search term below is Hebrew for Western Wall:
So, although it’s an edited down version of events it’s still well worth a look:
