11 ms·

Show HN: I built a service to discover rapidly growing Google search topics

446 points by jhow15 7y ago

jhow15 7y ago
Hey everyone, Josh here the creator. As a developer, I’m always looking out for an emerging market trend on which to bootstrap my own SaaS product. This is since market awareness and timing are often so critical, on top of execution skill of course! So I built Trennd. Under the hood it continually monitors the web for interesting keywords & topics, classifies them using Google Trends data and packages everything as a neat web app where other people can contribute too. The app itself is built with the Next.js React framework along with Express, Bootstrap and MongoDB. Next.js was new to me, but made sense since it comes with so much out of the box, including server side rendering. Let me know if you have any questions, and any feedback is much appreciated!
- deadcoder0904 7y ago
  You said you are monitoring interesting keywords & topics but how do you know which keywords & topics to monitor? Also, if you are choosing the keywords then wouldn't the data be inaccurate for predicting trends as trends occur randomly?
  - jhow15 7y ago
    I have scripts that are crawling the web in places like twitter, reddit and facebook to generate keyword ideas. So the trends that it detects is biased towards the corners of the web that I am monitoring. Which skew heavily tech!
    - mooreds 7y ago
      This is a great service. It would be great for you to take suggestions on other locations to crawl.
      - jhow15 7y ago
        That's a brilliant idea, will add somewhere for people to make suggestions. Thank you!
- maxencecornet 7y ago
  What could be a really neat addition is having trends sorted by countries
  - jhow15 7y ago
    Great idea, thank you!
- omarhaneef 7y ago
  Nice work Josh. It can probably be used for lots of things: startups, as you mentioned, but also journalism ideas, investing ideas, job hunting and many more.
  - jhow15 7y ago
    Thank you! Yeah totally agree, I hadn't thought of job hunting though!!
- nurettin 7y ago
  Hi, it would be nice if the keywords had short explanations. I had to find out what an affinity designer and an enneagram was. Bubble tea was also quite new.
- yuy910616 7y ago
  Hi Josh, Very interesting stuff. Can I ask what is the math behind defining the trend? How did you calculate the most trendy words, etc? I'm working on something similar for a internal tool, so I'm curious to see what your solution is. Thanks!
  - jhow15 7y ago
    Of course - I have scripts constantly monitoring the web for potentially interesting keywords. I then check google trends data for that topic/keyword and analyze the gradient of the line of best fit over different timeframes. If the gradient is higher than a certain (arbitrary) amount, then I class it as a trend!
    - peterhil 7y ago
      Is the gradient just a linear least squares fit?
      - yuy910616 7y ago
        Not the author. Seems like it, it doesn't look like Google Trend gives other variables, so just simple 2 var regression I'd guess
- charlesism 7y ago
  I don’t have much feedback, except to say I think this is a really good, useful concept.
  - jhow15 7y ago
    Thanks so much!
- simonebrunozzi 7y ago
  Hey Josh, very interesting concept. Thanks for building it! I tried to use the "technology" category, but the results are not what I expected. Perhaps it would be more useful if I could narrow it down to more specific things, e.g. programming languages, or databases. Keep up the good work!
- gondo 7y ago
  would be interesting to also to see the opposite, retreating trends
  - vernie 7y ago
    It seems to already have that (the "gradient" arrow)
- ashelmire 7y ago
  These results aren't filtered in some way? I find it suspicious that almost all of the top ~100 results are tech related.
  - concert-gilled 7y ago
    > I have scripts that are crawling the web in places like twitter, reddit and facebook to generate keyword ideas. So the trends that it detects is biased towards the corners of the web that I am monitoring. Which skew heavily tech!
- markdown 7y ago
  OT but... > built with the Next.js React framework Wait wait wait... do you mean to say there's now a framework for a framework? Javascriptland continues to confound.
  - hashbig 7y ago
    I wouldn't call React a framework, it's more like a library.
- tasssko 7y ago
  Awesome I enjoyed making some trend charts, and the results are fun (i.e I added DevOps, Erlang, Elixir). I think there is a risk it could conceal too many errors and biases for it to be useful for trend analysis. Using services like Twitter and Reddit might introduce biases into your data skewing trends. The challenge is using data and not understanding the intent (is it positive, negative or neutral/sarcastic potentially negative/positive). Google Adwords is good at this. I applaud your effort; I hope you keep going but its a tough nut to crack. I use markets like Google Adwords Tools to do this at the moment, have you looked at it? I think more info around time, intent and volume.
- kevinguh 7y ago
  Pretty neat, I see the most granular time scale currently supported is a 3-month window -- are there any plans to increase granularity towards a (near) real-time system? I get your crawler might be rate-limited at that scale and you would likely have to rethink the entire system architecture, but I think real-time data would open up a whole new dimension of possibilities for detecting/predicting trends perhaps even before public awareness catches up. I'd imagine there would be parties interested in paying for that kind of capability if that's the direction you're planning on taking this idea
  - jhow15 7y ago
    I'd love to go as granular as possible, at least 30 days. Real-time would be ideal, but as you note - Google Trends rate limiting soon becomes a hurdle especially when you potentially multiply by different geographies.
- taneem 7y ago
  Hi Josh - it would be incredible to have this filtered by location, and I think you can get that from Google Trends.
  - jhow15 7y ago
    Absolutely agree! How specific/granular would be the most valuable to you - at the city level perhaps?
    - taneem 7y ago
      Yes - City would be great for people doing stuff around activities, events and local places. But Country would be more powerful for e-commerce I suspect (my usecase).
swalsh 7y ago
This definately has a market, but i'm not sure SaaS is it. More typical eCommerce products have a "flavor of the day" like effect, where an article is written in some niche community, and everyone in that community rushes out to buy the thing. Then a few months later, the craze is over. If you're Amazon, you can spot these trends easily (because they have everyone's sales data from the marketplace). If you're a small eCommerce company, unless you just happen to have that product on hand, and someone just happened to have found you, you may never even realize the trend existed. Being alerted that there is a sudden demand for a product, might give you a headstart on marketing and might help you negotiate a deal with a supplier before the supplier realizes what they have.
- jsonne 7y ago
  I'm a moderator of one of the bigger Facebook advertising groups that exist. This caught my eye instantly as the e-commerce and affiliate crowd are going to be all over it. They love being able to catch trends relatively early. This product is ready made built for flavor of the moment marketers.
  - jhow15 7y ago
    That's awesome to hear! If I were to build Trennd towards these e-commerce guys, what would you improve/add/change to make them love it?
    - jsonne 7y ago
      For sure. So shorter term. They're going to want to move faster than 3 months. Maybe like a past 30 day trend if possible? I would say also if there's a way you could dig into Alibaba and see if there's a bunch of new items of the same type getting listed recently that would be extremely interesting for them as well.
      - jhow15 7y ago
        Last 30 days - got it! That's an interesting angle regarding Alibaba. The hard part might be automatically grouping similar items, but definitely can see the huge value in this.
bonniemuffin 7y ago
What's the time scale on the x axis? Are these trending over hours, days, months?
- donmatito 7y ago
  you can see timescale on top in a dropdown menu
- jhow15 7y ago
  The default is 5 years, but there is a dropdown select where you can choose from 3 months to 15 years.
donmatito 7y ago
That's very neat and interesting; I guess the two questions are - how do you generate keywords to search for ? - how do you filter out noise (or perhaps you don't filter it) ?
- donmatito 7y ago
  additional question, maybe related to the question on noise : what is the Y axis? number of queries I suppose but are they normalized?
  - jhow15 7y ago
    Yeah they're normalized relative to a scale of 100, as it's Google trends data. In the future I want to include actual search volume numbers as a line on the chart too though. Just need to figure out where to get that data first!
- jhow15 7y ago
  I have scripts that are crawling the web in places like twitter, reddit and facebook to generate keyword ideas. Right now, I'm filtering out the noise and crud manually! So it's a combination of automation and curation by hand.
chrisweekly 7y ago
Very cool! Thank you for sharing -- and for creating it! Have you considered taking a step further in the "open" direction and making it OSS?
- jhow15 7y ago
  Thank you - appreciate it!! I actually hadn't considered OSS, which part of it specifically would be most interesting to see?
  - janesconference 7y ago
    The keyword generation part, for me
onion2k 7y ago
Very minor bug - if a user has an emoji in their Twitter name the default blank avatar doesn't quite work correctly - https://trennd.co/user/5d31d11ce6f3ce02e53269c7 https://trennd.co/user/5d31d11ce6f3ce02e53269c7
- jhow15 7y ago
  Ahah - thanks for the heads up!
tw1010 7y ago
The examples on the front page looks surprisingly good, which makes me suspect they were hand-picked. Kind of beats the purpose of the app if I'm just shown trends the author and me already know about, since we seem to inhabit the same subcultures.
- jhow15 7y ago
  Yes, I do filter out any chaff, since the scripts I have crawling the web to generate keyword ideas aren't perfect! Right now they're monitoring the obvious techie havens, but I'm looking to expand their coverage to be more comprehensive.
  - baldeagle 7y ago
    When building a system that surfaces interesting trends, you have to be careful about curating which historic examples you show. People will craft their understanding of predictive power based on those examples... but if the examples aren't representative (i.e. randomly sampled) of the algorithm, then you're selling people rainbows and unicorns.
  - tw1010 7y ago
    Ok, anyway cool app! I actually found some cool trends via this.
thecatspaw 7y ago
As a quick feedback, currently the front page has no indication what use signing up is.
- jhow15 7y ago
  Signing up allows you to add and upvote trends yourself. But duly noted! I will make that clearer.
  - thecatspaw 7y ago
    I figured out the adding trends after clicking on one. Are the trends on the frontpage sorted by upvotes?
    - jhow15 7y ago
      They're sorted by gradient. But you can sort by upvotes too.
      - 743665Tez0 7y ago
        The "Insight" section needs more attention, Suposedly is for subject matter experts yet in this example we see uninformed biased opinions. Examples 1) https://trennd.co/trend/ketogenic-diet https://trennd.co/trend/ketogenic-diet 2) https://trennd.co/trend/plant-based-diet https://trennd.co/trend/plant-based-diet
onion2k 7y ago
How can there be a big spike in the 'cattle' trend - https://trennd.co/trend/cattle https://trennd.co/trend/cattle - but no corresponding change on Google Trends - https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=undefined https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=... ?
- jhow15 7y ago
  The spike for cattle appears to be in Google trends for me: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=%2Fg%2F122h0nq6 https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=...
- mmazing 7y ago
  Looks like if you go back a few years you can see a bump.
- martin-adams 7y ago
  There seems to be different classifications of Cattle - search term, Animal and Cattle. No idea what that means, but it suggests why you're not seeing the same data.
cryptica 7y ago
It's interesting to see that topics like 'fentanyl', 'opiod' have done up. Also 'criminal defenses', 'wrongful death claim' have gone up a lot as well - Perhaps they are related to spikes in searches for plastic surgery topics. Also it's weird why almost all the topics on the front page are related to software development. It's like there is some kind of conspiracy to turn the world's population into software developers.
0wis 7y ago
Curious to know how Your filters are defined (spike, potential, hyper) Thanks, i’ll follow and maybe use !
- jhow15 7y ago
  Right now spike/potential/hyper classifications are my subjective opinion.. which I hate because that varies depending on the day I'm having and my specific biases. Figuring out how to classify them mathematically is next on the to-do list. For example a spike would have extreme outliers in the middle and hyper would be over a certain exponent.
  - fvdessen 7y ago
    It would be nice if it could discriminate between trends that are still in exponential growth from the ones that have passed the inflexion point.
AznHisoka 7y ago
This is awesome. I'd love to have the ability to view topics based on category. IE. see the biggest trends in entertainment or the biggest trends in sports players, or the biggest trends in startup brands.
- yoz-y 7y ago
  There seems to be a filter on the top to do just that. https://trennd.co/?categories=%255B%2522sport%2522%255D https://trennd.co/?categories=%255B%2522sport%2522%255D
- jhow15 7y ago
  There are quite broad category filters you can use right now, like "sport" or "food". Definitely looking to classify with more precise categories in the future like sports players etc as you mention
suvelx 7y ago
Is there a plan to sell the data as an API? I am currently working with a client who is exploring the options for building out a similar system.
- jhow15 7y ago
  Selling the data as an API is definitely a potential. I was originally thinking to allow CSV downloads of the data. Would an API be more useful for your client's use case?
  - suvelx 7y ago
    You seem to have done most of the hard work, collecting the data. I'm not sure they'd care what format the data was in. Providing it could be expanded to cover the topics their clients need.
    - jhow15 7y ago
      Yeah absolutely - topic coverage can be expanded. Shoot me an email and we can chat more: josh at trennd dot co
      - suvelx 7y ago
        Sounds great, I'll ping you an email sometime next week!
- quickthrower2 7y ago
  And/or sell the service where you BYO keyword list and this ranks them. Keyword lists can themselves be scraped from forums and websites in the marked the client is interested. The scraping could also be an add on service. This would lock in nicely with the keyword research that ahrefs, moz, etc. offer. And other various colour hat seo software.
akl_bh 7y ago
This is really cool.
omarhaneef 7y ago
Very nice. Are these all public sources? Have you considered backtesting it to see if you can get a trading signal out of it?
libria 7y ago
`Gmail` appears to be trending down but exhibits local maxima right around Spring and Fall equinox: https://trennd.co/trend/gmail https://trennd.co/trend/gmail Now why would that be...
- omarhaneef 7y ago
  I guess the most logical conclusion is that every time they make a sacrifice under the full moon during the equinox, they get rewarded with more interest in Gmail.
bluepeter 7y ago
This is similar in some ways to https://meetglimpse.com/ https://meetglimpse.com/ The key value-add, in my mind, from that product, besides the trend, is the editorial content they include in the email. Of course, that's just me as a layperson. I'd probably dupe their pricing model and approach: i.e., a limited number of weekly/monthly trends, subscribers get more.
- jhow15 7y ago
  Definitely - the glimpse newsletter looks good and is the same concept of surfacing new Google trends. I didn't like being limited to just a few trends per month everyone else sees via newsletter though. I was looking for an interactive app with 1000 trends I could dig through. But as you say, then the editorial content/insight for each trend is key value-add. That's part of the reason I've built in for users to be able to add their own trends, insights and comments. If we can crowdsource it, then to some extent we don't have to trade-off quantity and quality.
dceddia 7y ago
Very cool! As a front-end dev it's interesting (but I guess also not surprising) to see React and Vue with very steep curves. I wanted to try adding Svelte, so I signed up by email, but that doesn't seem to be working. Then I tried Sign In With Twitter but, wow, it requires an awful lot of permissions! Among them... Follow new people, Update your profile, and Post Tweets for you. I'd be a lot happier signing in with Twitter if it were limited to read-only abilities.
- mtnGoat 7y ago
  yea, or just signing in with an email and password. not sure why everyone thinks they need to have perms to my other services just to user theirs.
  - dceddia 7y ago
    Yeah, I’m not crazy about this trend toward emailing magic login links. I’ve got a password manager...
ericzawo 7y ago
This could have massive potential with music industry A&R's looking to capitalize on viral songs. That's where virtually all recording contract money is going nowadays.
Havoc 7y ago
Great stuff. Thanks
driverdan 7y ago
Where's the data coming from? I assume the trends are coming from Google Trends but how are topics found?
kmorris1077 7y ago
Cool idea, but all charts are empty. Hugged by Hacker News?
- uponcoffee 7y ago
  Same issue here, on mobile - firefoxpreview for Android - if that helps
- jhow15 7y ago
  Yeah - just got hugged! Upgraded my mongodb atlas cluster to resolve the issue, apologies.
otterpro 7y ago
I'd also like to see downward trends, not just growing trend. From the last page or two, I see some downward trend, like "blog", "facebook", and "gmail". I don't know if it means the decline of popularity, but it is definitely interesting to see the declining graph.
deleted 7y ago
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jothezero 7y ago
Internal Server Error (500)
throw03172019 7y ago
Web server down? Anyone else getting it to load?
- jhow15 7y ago
  Should be back up now! Apologies - had to upgrade my mongodb atlas cluster, it got hugged.
freakynit 7y ago
Are topics coming from twitter trending? Also, can you add filter of industry-wise topics? Good work btw :)
Fnoord 7y ago
I wonder if it would not be more interesting to see the unique search queries instead ie. the least popular search queries. (In the spirit of "YouTube videos that have almost zero previous views" [1] / astronaut.io) [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20432772 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20432772
beardedman 7y ago
Very cool, but this is essentially not "discovery". There is a heavy skew toward tech - but niche tech (Notion for example) specifically. It would be cool to get a broader, less bias perspective.
pengstrom 7y ago
Looks good, but I miss units on the axis. On mobile, it's missing from the start page. The units for the y-axis on the detail view is missing (as far as I can see).
wolfpwner 7y ago
Looks like it can be used to discover new form of investments
anarchitect 7y ago
Brilliant stuff. Fascinating to see how seasonal some of the searches are – "rosé" and "Aperol" spikes in July and December (southern/northern hemisphere summers?), "carbs" and "low-carbohydrate diet" peaks in January (when people want to change their habits?).
aloer 7y ago
OT, the chart for remote recruitment looks very cyclic -> https://trennd.co/trend/remote-recruitment https://trennd.co/trend/remote-recruitment any idea where this is coming from?
mapster 7y ago
Is there a Pro version where I can get alerts and manage my keywords etc and have a dashboard?
fareesh 7y ago
Is there some open source version of something like this? I would be interested in monitoring some non-tech topics and it would be useful to have something with most of the basic features in place to do so, even if it's a library
genbit 7y ago
https://trennd.co/trend/suicide-1 https://trennd.co/trend/suicide-1 interesting: why spike? why Science category?
RosanaAnaDana 7y ago
So... whats up with: https://trennd.co/trend/craft-beer https://trennd.co/trend/craft-beer A peak every April and a dip every December? This seems like the result of some smoothing algorithm needing ~4 months of data and resetting every year. This one even more consistent: https://trennd.co/trend/airbnb https://trennd.co/trend/airbnb
- yorwba 7y ago
  People search for more craft beer before Christmas (because they're looking for a unique gift) and less for AirBnB (because they get together with their families for the holidays). Seasonal patterns in data about human behavior are the norm rather than the exception. That includes search trends. There are also monthly, weekly and daily cycles, as well as some that have not quite yearly period, e.g. Ramadan.
punnerud 7y ago
What about also crawling data from AdSense? That way you also get the search numbers, not just the relative graph. You see these numbers as part of planning for a campaign. There is also an API for it.
rootsudo 7y ago
This is great!
abbadadda 7y ago
This is pretty brilliant. I'd hook up something to identify trends with companies that can potentially be invested in. Could be useful from a publicly traded stand point (Good ole stock picking) or even VC investing if the product was rapidly growing and not yet heavily invested in.
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terrycody 7y ago
If possible, I'd like ti integrate with the real monthly search numbers for each keyword, I can't get it anywhere, only see a trend score, could u explain a bit more on this?
justinsaccount 7y ago
Many years ago I built a service on appengine to hit the auto complete api endpoint for every single and 2 letter prefix, as well as things like "how do I" or "what is the". It ran for a few months before blowing up the free quota, but it was pretty cool while it lasted.. Seeing certain things bubble up and then disappear. Like right now 'lion king' is the first suggestion for 'l', but I doubt it was a month ago.
apexkid 7y ago
What is your Algo for calculating Trends? I mean how do you say that something is trending? It is most popular? Emerging? Z-score?
- vdfs 7y ago
  It's probably built on Google Trends
tduberne 7y ago
Nice idea. For very short time spans, I noticed some "trends" seem to be seasonal trends ("aperol", "lawn mower"...). It might be interesting to compare with the trend for the same search the year before at the same period, to be able to identify those cases (for intance, I cannot see from the graphs whether Aperol is more or less trendy this summer compared to last summer)

446 points by jhow15 7y ago

Hey everyone, Josh here the creator. As a developer, I’m always looking out for an emerging market trend on which to bootstrap my own SaaS product. This is since market awareness and timing are often so critical, on top of execution skill of course! So I built Trennd. Under the hood it continually monitors the web for interesting keywords & topics, classifies them using Google Trends data and packages everything as a neat web app where other people can contribute too. The app itself is built with the Next.js React framework along with Express, Bootstrap and MongoDB. Next.js was new to me, but made sense since it comes with so much out of the box, including server side rendering. Let me know if you have any questions, and any feedback is much appreciated!

deadcoder0904 7y ago
You said you are monitoring interesting keywords & topics but how do you know which keywords & topics to monitor? Also, if you are choosing the keywords then wouldn't the data be inaccurate for predicting trends as trends occur randomly?
- jhow15 7y ago
  I have scripts that are crawling the web in places like twitter, reddit and facebook to generate keyword ideas. So the trends that it detects is biased towards the corners of the web that I am monitoring. Which skew heavily tech!
  - mooreds 7y ago
    This is a great service. It would be great for you to take suggestions on other locations to crawl.
    - jhow15 7y ago
      That's a brilliant idea, will add somewhere for people to make suggestions. Thank you!
maxencecornet 7y ago
What could be a really neat addition is having trends sorted by countries
- jhow15 7y ago
  Great idea, thank you!
omarhaneef 7y ago
Nice work Josh. It can probably be used for lots of things: startups, as you mentioned, but also journalism ideas, investing ideas, job hunting and many more.
- jhow15 7y ago
  Thank you! Yeah totally agree, I hadn't thought of job hunting though!!
nurettin 7y ago
Hi, it would be nice if the keywords had short explanations. I had to find out what an affinity designer and an enneagram was. Bubble tea was also quite new.
yuy910616 7y ago
Hi Josh, Very interesting stuff. Can I ask what is the math behind defining the trend? How did you calculate the most trendy words, etc? I'm working on something similar for a internal tool, so I'm curious to see what your solution is. Thanks!
- jhow15 7y ago
  Of course - I have scripts constantly monitoring the web for potentially interesting keywords. I then check google trends data for that topic/keyword and analyze the gradient of the line of best fit over different timeframes. If the gradient is higher than a certain (arbitrary) amount, then I class it as a trend!
  - peterhil 7y ago
    Is the gradient just a linear least squares fit?
    - yuy910616 7y ago
      Not the author. Seems like it, it doesn't look like Google Trend gives other variables, so just simple 2 var regression I'd guess
charlesism 7y ago
I don’t have much feedback, except to say I think this is a really good, useful concept.
- jhow15 7y ago
  Thanks so much!
simonebrunozzi 7y ago
Hey Josh, very interesting concept. Thanks for building it! I tried to use the "technology" category, but the results are not what I expected. Perhaps it would be more useful if I could narrow it down to more specific things, e.g. programming languages, or databases. Keep up the good work!
gondo 7y ago
would be interesting to also to see the opposite, retreating trends
- vernie 7y ago
  It seems to already have that (the "gradient" arrow)
ashelmire 7y ago
These results aren't filtered in some way? I find it suspicious that almost all of the top ~100 results are tech related.
- concert-gilled 7y ago
  > I have scripts that are crawling the web in places like twitter, reddit and facebook to generate keyword ideas. So the trends that it detects is biased towards the corners of the web that I am monitoring. Which skew heavily tech!
markdown 7y ago
OT but... > built with the Next.js React framework Wait wait wait... do you mean to say there's now a framework for a framework? Javascriptland continues to confound.
- hashbig 7y ago
  I wouldn't call React a framework, it's more like a library.
tasssko 7y ago
Awesome I enjoyed making some trend charts, and the results are fun (i.e I added DevOps, Erlang, Elixir). I think there is a risk it could conceal too many errors and biases for it to be useful for trend analysis. Using services like Twitter and Reddit might introduce biases into your data skewing trends. The challenge is using data and not understanding the intent (is it positive, negative or neutral/sarcastic potentially negative/positive). Google Adwords is good at this. I applaud your effort; I hope you keep going but its a tough nut to crack. I use markets like Google Adwords Tools to do this at the moment, have you looked at it? I think more info around time, intent and volume.
kevinguh 7y ago
Pretty neat, I see the most granular time scale currently supported is a 3-month window -- are there any plans to increase granularity towards a (near) real-time system? I get your crawler might be rate-limited at that scale and you would likely have to rethink the entire system architecture, but I think real-time data would open up a whole new dimension of possibilities for detecting/predicting trends perhaps even before public awareness catches up. I'd imagine there would be parties interested in paying for that kind of capability if that's the direction you're planning on taking this idea
- jhow15 7y ago
  I'd love to go as granular as possible, at least 30 days. Real-time would be ideal, but as you note - Google Trends rate limiting soon becomes a hurdle especially when you potentially multiply by different geographies.
taneem 7y ago
Hi Josh - it would be incredible to have this filtered by location, and I think you can get that from Google Trends.
- jhow15 7y ago
  Absolutely agree! How specific/granular would be the most valuable to you - at the city level perhaps?
  - taneem 7y ago
    Yes - City would be great for people doing stuff around activities, events and local places. But Country would be more powerful for e-commerce I suspect (my usecase).

swalsh 7y ago

This definately has a market, but i'm not sure SaaS is it. More typical eCommerce products have a "flavor of the day" like effect, where an article is written in some niche community, and everyone in that community rushes out to buy the thing. Then a few months later, the craze is over. If you're Amazon, you can spot these trends easily (because they have everyone's sales data from the marketplace). If you're a small eCommerce company, unless you just happen to have that product on hand, and someone just happened to have found you, you may never even realize the trend existed. Being alerted that there is a sudden demand for a product, might give you a headstart on marketing and might help you negotiate a deal with a supplier before the supplier realizes what they have.

jsonne 7y ago
I'm a moderator of one of the bigger Facebook advertising groups that exist. This caught my eye instantly as the e-commerce and affiliate crowd are going to be all over it. They love being able to catch trends relatively early. This product is ready made built for flavor of the moment marketers.
- jhow15 7y ago
  That's awesome to hear! If I were to build Trennd towards these e-commerce guys, what would you improve/add/change to make them love it?
  - jsonne 7y ago
    For sure. So shorter term. They're going to want to move faster than 3 months. Maybe like a past 30 day trend if possible? I would say also if there's a way you could dig into Alibaba and see if there's a bunch of new items of the same type getting listed recently that would be extremely interesting for them as well.
    - jhow15 7y ago
      Last 30 days - got it! That's an interesting angle regarding Alibaba. The hard part might be automatically grouping similar items, but definitely can see the huge value in this.

bonniemuffin 7y ago

What's the time scale on the x axis? Are these trending over hours, days, months?

donmatito 7y ago
you can see timescale on top in a dropdown menu
jhow15 7y ago
The default is 5 years, but there is a dropdown select where you can choose from 3 months to 15 years.

donmatito 7y ago

That's very neat and interesting; I guess the two questions are - how do you generate keywords to search for ? - how do you filter out noise (or perhaps you don't filter it) ?

donmatito 7y ago
additional question, maybe related to the question on noise : what is the Y axis? number of queries I suppose but are they normalized?
- jhow15 7y ago
  Yeah they're normalized relative to a scale of 100, as it's Google trends data. In the future I want to include actual search volume numbers as a line on the chart too though. Just need to figure out where to get that data first!
jhow15 7y ago
I have scripts that are crawling the web in places like twitter, reddit and facebook to generate keyword ideas. Right now, I'm filtering out the noise and crud manually! So it's a combination of automation and curation by hand.

chrisweekly 7y ago

Very cool! Thank you for sharing -- and for creating it! Have you considered taking a step further in the "open" direction and making it OSS?

jhow15 7y ago
Thank you - appreciate it!! I actually hadn't considered OSS, which part of it specifically would be most interesting to see?
- janesconference 7y ago
  The keyword generation part, for me

onion2k 7y ago

Very minor bug - if a user has an emoji in their Twitter name the default blank avatar doesn't quite work correctly - https://trennd.co/user/5d31d11ce6f3ce02e53269c7 https://trennd.co/user/5d31d11ce6f3ce02e53269c7

jhow15 7y ago
Ahah - thanks for the heads up!

tw1010 7y ago

The examples on the front page looks surprisingly good, which makes me suspect they were hand-picked. Kind of beats the purpose of the app if I'm just shown trends the author and me already know about, since we seem to inhabit the same subcultures.

jhow15 7y ago
Yes, I do filter out any chaff, since the scripts I have crawling the web to generate keyword ideas aren't perfect! Right now they're monitoring the obvious techie havens, but I'm looking to expand their coverage to be more comprehensive.
- baldeagle 7y ago
  When building a system that surfaces interesting trends, you have to be careful about curating which historic examples you show. People will craft their understanding of predictive power based on those examples... but if the examples aren't representative (i.e. randomly sampled) of the algorithm, then you're selling people rainbows and unicorns.
- tw1010 7y ago
  Ok, anyway cool app! I actually found some cool trends via this.

thecatspaw 7y ago

As a quick feedback, currently the front page has no indication what use signing up is.

jhow15 7y ago
Signing up allows you to add and upvote trends yourself. But duly noted! I will make that clearer.
- thecatspaw 7y ago
  I figured out the adding trends after clicking on one. Are the trends on the frontpage sorted by upvotes?
  - jhow15 7y ago
    They're sorted by gradient. But you can sort by upvotes too.
    - 743665Tez0 7y ago
      The "Insight" section needs more attention, Suposedly is for subject matter experts yet in this example we see uninformed biased opinions. Examples 1) https://trennd.co/trend/ketogenic-diet https://trennd.co/trend/ketogenic-diet 2) https://trennd.co/trend/plant-based-diet https://trennd.co/trend/plant-based-diet

onion2k 7y ago

How can there be a big spike in the 'cattle' trend - https://trennd.co/trend/cattle https://trennd.co/trend/cattle - but no corresponding change on Google Trends - https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=undefined https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=... ?

jhow15 7y ago
The spike for cattle appears to be in Google trends for me: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=%2Fg%2F122h0nq6 https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=...
mmazing 7y ago
Looks like if you go back a few years you can see a bump.
martin-adams 7y ago
There seems to be different classifications of Cattle - search term, Animal and Cattle. No idea what that means, but it suggests why you're not seeing the same data.

cryptica 7y ago

It's interesting to see that topics like 'fentanyl', 'opiod' have done up. Also 'criminal defenses', 'wrongful death claim' have gone up a lot as well - Perhaps they are related to spikes in searches for plastic surgery topics. Also it's weird why almost all the topics on the front page are related to software development. It's like there is some kind of conspiracy to turn the world's population into software developers.

0wis 7y ago

Curious to know how Your filters are defined (spike, potential, hyper) Thanks, i’ll follow and maybe use !

jhow15 7y ago
Right now spike/potential/hyper classifications are my subjective opinion.. which I hate because that varies depending on the day I'm having and my specific biases. Figuring out how to classify them mathematically is next on the to-do list. For example a spike would have extreme outliers in the middle and hyper would be over a certain exponent.
- fvdessen 7y ago
  It would be nice if it could discriminate between trends that are still in exponential growth from the ones that have passed the inflexion point.

AznHisoka 7y ago

This is awesome. I'd love to have the ability to view topics based on category. IE. see the biggest trends in entertainment or the biggest trends in sports players, or the biggest trends in startup brands.

yoz-y 7y ago
There seems to be a filter on the top to do just that. https://trennd.co/?categories=%255B%2522sport%2522%255D https://trennd.co/?categories=%255B%2522sport%2522%255D
jhow15 7y ago
There are quite broad category filters you can use right now, like "sport" or "food". Definitely looking to classify with more precise categories in the future like sports players etc as you mention

suvelx 7y ago

Is there a plan to sell the data as an API? I am currently working with a client who is exploring the options for building out a similar system.

jhow15 7y ago
Selling the data as an API is definitely a potential. I was originally thinking to allow CSV downloads of the data. Would an API be more useful for your client's use case?
- suvelx 7y ago
  You seem to have done most of the hard work, collecting the data. I'm not sure they'd care what format the data was in. Providing it could be expanded to cover the topics their clients need.
  - jhow15 7y ago
    Yeah absolutely - topic coverage can be expanded. Shoot me an email and we can chat more: josh at trennd dot co
    - suvelx 7y ago
      Sounds great, I'll ping you an email sometime next week!
quickthrower2 7y ago
And/or sell the service where you BYO keyword list and this ranks them. Keyword lists can themselves be scraped from forums and websites in the marked the client is interested. The scraping could also be an add on service. This would lock in nicely with the keyword research that ahrefs, moz, etc. offer. And other various colour hat seo software.

akl_bh 7y ago

This is really cool.

omarhaneef 7y ago

Very nice. Are these all public sources? Have you considered backtesting it to see if you can get a trading signal out of it?

libria 7y ago

`Gmail` appears to be trending down but exhibits local maxima right around Spring and Fall equinox: https://trennd.co/trend/gmail https://trennd.co/trend/gmail Now why would that be...

omarhaneef 7y ago
I guess the most logical conclusion is that every time they make a sacrifice under the full moon during the equinox, they get rewarded with more interest in Gmail.

bluepeter 7y ago

This is similar in some ways to https://meetglimpse.com/ https://meetglimpse.com/ The key value-add, in my mind, from that product, besides the trend, is the editorial content they include in the email. Of course, that's just me as a layperson. I'd probably dupe their pricing model and approach: i.e., a limited number of weekly/monthly trends, subscribers get more.

jhow15 7y ago
Definitely - the glimpse newsletter looks good and is the same concept of surfacing new Google trends. I didn't like being limited to just a few trends per month everyone else sees via newsletter though. I was looking for an interactive app with 1000 trends I could dig through. But as you say, then the editorial content/insight for each trend is key value-add. That's part of the reason I've built in for users to be able to add their own trends, insights and comments. If we can crowdsource it, then to some extent we don't have to trade-off quantity and quality.

dceddia 7y ago

Very cool! As a front-end dev it's interesting (but I guess also not surprising) to see React and Vue with very steep curves. I wanted to try adding Svelte, so I signed up by email, but that doesn't seem to be working. Then I tried Sign In With Twitter but, wow, it requires an awful lot of permissions! Among them... Follow new people, Update your profile, and Post Tweets for you. I'd be a lot happier signing in with Twitter if it were limited to read-only abilities.

mtnGoat 7y ago
yea, or just signing in with an email and password. not sure why everyone thinks they need to have perms to my other services just to user theirs.
- dceddia 7y ago
  Yeah, I’m not crazy about this trend toward emailing magic login links. I’ve got a password manager...

ericzawo 7y ago

This could have massive potential with music industry A&R's looking to capitalize on viral songs. That's where virtually all recording contract money is going nowadays.

Havoc 7y ago

Great stuff. Thanks

driverdan 7y ago

Where's the data coming from? I assume the trends are coming from Google Trends but how are topics found?

kmorris1077 7y ago

Cool idea, but all charts are empty. Hugged by Hacker News?

uponcoffee 7y ago
Same issue here, on mobile - firefoxpreview for Android - if that helps
jhow15 7y ago
Yeah - just got hugged! Upgraded my mongodb atlas cluster to resolve the issue, apologies.

otterpro 7y ago

I'd also like to see downward trends, not just growing trend. From the last page or two, I see some downward trend, like "blog", "facebook", and "gmail". I don't know if it means the decline of popularity, but it is definitely interesting to see the declining graph.

deleted 7y ago

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jothezero 7y ago

Internal Server Error (500)

throw03172019 7y ago

Web server down? Anyone else getting it to load?

jhow15 7y ago
Should be back up now! Apologies - had to upgrade my mongodb atlas cluster, it got hugged.

freakynit 7y ago

Are topics coming from twitter trending? Also, can you add filter of industry-wise topics? Good work btw :)

Fnoord 7y ago

I wonder if it would not be more interesting to see the unique search queries instead ie. the least popular search queries. (In the spirit of "YouTube videos that have almost zero previous views" [1] / astronaut.io) [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20432772 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20432772

beardedman 7y ago

Very cool, but this is essentially not "discovery". There is a heavy skew toward tech - but niche tech (Notion for example) specifically. It would be cool to get a broader, less bias perspective.

pengstrom 7y ago

Looks good, but I miss units on the axis. On mobile, it's missing from the start page. The units for the y-axis on the detail view is missing (as far as I can see).

wolfpwner 7y ago

Looks like it can be used to discover new form of investments

anarchitect 7y ago

Brilliant stuff. Fascinating to see how seasonal some of the searches are – "rosé" and "Aperol" spikes in July and December (southern/northern hemisphere summers?), "carbs" and "low-carbohydrate diet" peaks in January (when people want to change their habits?).

aloer 7y ago

OT, the chart for remote recruitment looks very cyclic -> https://trennd.co/trend/remote-recruitment https://trennd.co/trend/remote-recruitment any idea where this is coming from?

mapster 7y ago

Is there a Pro version where I can get alerts and manage my keywords etc and have a dashboard?

fareesh 7y ago

Is there some open source version of something like this? I would be interested in monitoring some non-tech topics and it would be useful to have something with most of the basic features in place to do so, even if it's a library

genbit 7y ago

https://trennd.co/trend/suicide-1 https://trennd.co/trend/suicide-1 interesting: why spike? why Science category?

RosanaAnaDana 7y ago

So... whats up with: https://trennd.co/trend/craft-beer https://trennd.co/trend/craft-beer A peak every April and a dip every December? This seems like the result of some smoothing algorithm needing ~4 months of data and resetting every year. This one even more consistent: https://trennd.co/trend/airbnb https://trennd.co/trend/airbnb

yorwba 7y ago
People search for more craft beer before Christmas (because they're looking for a unique gift) and less for AirBnB (because they get together with their families for the holidays). Seasonal patterns in data about human behavior are the norm rather than the exception. That includes search trends. There are also monthly, weekly and daily cycles, as well as some that have not quite yearly period, e.g. Ramadan.

punnerud 7y ago

What about also crawling data from AdSense? That way you also get the search numbers, not just the relative graph. You see these numbers as part of planning for a campaign. There is also an API for it.

rootsudo 7y ago

This is great!

abbadadda 7y ago

This is pretty brilliant. I'd hook up something to identify trends with companies that can potentially be invested in. Could be useful from a publicly traded stand point (Good ole stock picking) or even VC investing if the product was rapidly growing and not yet heavily invested in.

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terrycody 7y ago

If possible, I'd like ti integrate with the real monthly search numbers for each keyword, I can't get it anywhere, only see a trend score, could u explain a bit more on this?

justinsaccount 7y ago

Many years ago I built a service on appengine to hit the auto complete api endpoint for every single and 2 letter prefix, as well as things like "how do I" or "what is the". It ran for a few months before blowing up the free quota, but it was pretty cool while it lasted.. Seeing certain things bubble up and then disappear. Like right now 'lion king' is the first suggestion for 'l', but I doubt it was a month ago.

apexkid 7y ago

What is your Algo for calculating Trends? I mean how do you say that something is trending? It is most popular? Emerging? Z-score?

vdfs 7y ago
It's probably built on Google Trends

tduberne 7y ago

Nice idea. For very short time spans, I noticed some "trends" seem to be seasonal trends ("aperol", "lawn mower"...). It might be interesting to compare with the trend for the same search the year before at the same period, to be able to identify those cases (for intance, I cannot see from the graphs whether Aperol is more or less trendy this summer compared to last summer)