San Francisco — So far, only few search engines outsmart Google when it comes to finding accurate relevant results. Google might not be fascinated in acquiring Twitter but it has become aggressive in competing with it in the real-time search capabilities. If you live in the U.S. or Japan, you might be happy to check this out. Search titan Google today launched a new feature that will highlight the latest search trends along side your search results.
Google has largely been tempted by the real-time search chatter initiated by Twitter and picked up by Microsoft Bing and real-time search startups Collecta, CrowdEye, OneRiot and others.
Google has, for some time, dedicated a section of its site called Hot Trends to the fastest rising searches on the web in the last hour. Google Hot Trends emphasizes the hottest topic on the web at any given moment. In addition, it also delivers some useful analytics data on how that particular keywords has been performing on Google search — how many people have been using it to search for particular information.
According to a Google blog post, if a user now searches for a keyword related to a current hot trends, which is featured on the list of top 100 searches in the last hour, Google will display a graph at the bottom of page the search results page, along with more information such as: how popular the query is, how fast it is rising over time, and other useful data.
Google spoke about this new feature: “The concept behind the [Hot Trends] OneBox is to not only provide you with search results as you would 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.”
Furthermore, this new web search feature, Google is also limiting the number of trends it lists on the Hot Trends homepage from 100 to 40.
“We hope it will help you keep up with everything there is to understand better about the latest trends online,” Googlers wrote in a blog post. “No more being out of the loop at your office watercooler!”
Although Hot Trends is not meant to replace Twitter Trends, a Twitter feature that displays you what the people are talking about at any given moment, OneBox will offer an alternative and should show what the wider web (people who are not on Twitter) are searching for and chatting about.
Unfortunately, the feature is only currently available in the U.S. AND Japan.