Google has updated the Hot Searches section to make the entries more relevant

Jun 12, 2012 18:50 GMT  ·  By

Google has updated its Hot Searches feature, part of Google Trends, to make it more visual and more appealing to the casual user. Hot topics now have photos next to them and links to news stories about them, as more often than not, hot searches generate news, or the other way around.

"You can learn a lot about what’s happening around the country or catch wind of a breaking news story by looking at what others are searching for," Google explained.

"With Hot Searches in Google Trends, you can see a list of the fastest rising search terms in the U.S. for a snapshot of what’s on the public’s collective mind," it said.

"To create the Hot Searches list which is updated on an hourly basis, an algorithm analyzes millions of searches in the U.S. and determines which queries are being searched much more than usual," it added.

The update makes the entries more useful, by providing context and ways of finding out more about the topic. Related searches, even if they're not similar are now grouped since they're about the same topic.

If it's something you think your friends of followers may find interesting, you can share the topic on Google+, Twitter or Facebook.

But the changes don't stop there. There's now also an estimate of the number of searches, in the US, for the topic for the past 24 hours.

The hot searches are more dynamic as well. Previously, Google only showed 20 topics per day, based on their popularity. Now, the top is updated every hour.

Google also filters the stories to make sure just the hot ones for the day are included, though there's no explanation of how exactly it does this or which stories are really "hot" and which aren't.