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What people are googling in real time
- ekr 13y agoThere's nothing real-time about it. The data (http://hawttrends.appspot.com/api/terms/ http://hawttrends.appspot.com/api/terms/) is pulled from Google Trends, but it's certainly not real-time, more like hourly updated.
- tunnuz 13y agoYet it's a pretty awesome way to get a snapshot of the trending topics of the day.
- aniketh 13y agoAnd it looks like everyone in India is searching for only a few terms continuously : http://www.google.com/trends/hottrends/visualize?nrow=5&ncol=5&pn=p3 http://www.google.com/trends/hottrends/visualize?nrow=5&ncol...
- snorkel 13y agoI figured as since most people don't type in Title Case.
- bobsoap 13y agoWhether it's real time or not doesn't have anything to do with the letter case.
- pitchups 13y agoActually you will be surprised by how many do type in Title Case. I have seen many non-techies do that. I have also noticed they do this in almost every movie and TV show, when someone is using a search engine.
- pseut 13y agoThat may be, for lack of a better word, muscle memory/reflex for some people. I found out last semester, when I wrote out lecture notes on an ipad that there are many words I literally forgot how to spell. I can type them, and I can write them with a pen, but writing with a stylus is different enough that it took several seconds of concentration before I could write it down. I wouldn't be surprised if there are words or phrases at I always capitalize.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- maskedinvader 13y agoGoogle does not claim its real time.Its a set of popular trending searches and it seems to update hourly.
- hornbaker 13y agoIt only updates after their prop fund trades on the data.
- skeletonjelly 13y agoI do wonder if their search engine trends department guys get involved with this stuff.
- dakimov 13y agoAren't the search lines supposed to be private data?
- nemo1618 13y agoAt google? Thanks for the laugh, mate
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- BaconJuice 13y agohaha that's so adorable.
- willismichael 13y agohttps://duckduckgo.com/ https://duckduckgo.com/ You're welcome.
- kunai 13y agoDuckDuckGo gets better results than Google, especially for research, but I've been extremely spoilt by Google's extra features like images, maps, and YouTube integration. I know you have "bang-cuts" like !g and !i, but it's kind of nice to have map results show up when you just search.
- jlarocco 13y agoDuckDuckGo also isn't very good at troubleshooting queries. For example if I'm having a problem configuring my wireless card, DuckDuckGo won't return anything useful, but Google will find some mailing lists and/or forums answering the same or a similar question. It's getting a lot better, though. It's great for everything else though.
- willismichael 13y agohttps://duckduckgo.com/?q=pizza+in+pasadena%2C+ca https://duckduckgo.com/?q=pizza+in+pasadena%2C+ca Maybe not quite the same, but I've seen incremental improvements in the months that I've been using DDG.
- aren55555 13y agoSomeone should make a screensaver out of this.
- wikwocket 13y agoLooks like it's already possible: http://betanews.com/2013/05/24/spy-on-the-worlds-web-searches-with-a-google-trends-screensaver/ http://betanews.com/2013/05/24/spy-on-the-worlds-web-searche... That said, and while the visualization is spiffy, I do not think I want the collective interest of the Internet displaying on my monitor for all to see when I am away. I've been to the Internet, and I can't say I approve of everything that goes on out there. ;)
- calinet6 13y agoMy thoughts exactly... can someone just do this so I can use it? :) *Update: This works awesomely. Just pop in the URL. https://github.com/liquidx/webviewscreensaver/downloads https://github.com/liquidx/webviewscreensaver/downloads
- mrcactu5 13y agohow do they take out all the porn? i'm serious!
- wikwocket 13y agoMaybe they remove the top 10% of searches?
- brianobush 13y agoSince they know what "porn" is by way of safesearch, the could easily check to see if a search query returns "unsafe" content.
- gesman 13y ago....after some heavy adult searches filtering....
- jmedwards 13y agoNice, is this the latest PRISM API mashup?
- ErikRogneby 13y agoHah! I was thinking the same thing. Kind of timely to release this visualization.
- joeblau 13y agoNice one.
- Lord_DeathMatch 13y agoHuh, nice. They have something somewhat similar in the lobby of the Sydney office, with a 3d globe displayed on several screens with search terms being displayed on their origins.
- hightowerman 13y agoI couldn't look at that for more than 10 seconds without seeing a Pirate Bay related search.
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- dpcan 13y agoSomeday, Google will know what I'm going to Google before I Google it. It's going to see a pattern of what I watch on TV, the websites I visit during the day, and on my phone, who I talk to, where I go, what I do, the kind of business I run, the products I buy, etc, etc. One night, I'll be watching Breaking Bad and head over to Google on my phone to see what other shows one of the Extras was in.... but Google will already know I'm probably watching Breaking Bad, and Google is going to know that I've looked up Extras before, so guess what, my Google home page is already going to be showing a list of all the Extras that were on Breaking Bad that night before I have to type anything in. When I turn on my Google Android phone in the morning, the phone will be smart enough to know everything I check every morning. I'll see the weather forecast first, then my sales numbers, probably headlines on Reddit and HN. When I pull up Google Maps a few days before Fathers day, it's going to know that I'm trying to find my way to various sporting goods stores, it'll automatically put them on the map before I have to type anything in. If I'm Googling before 5am, guess what, I'm looking up the best fishing reports... it'll be on my Google Home Page. Or will this all be in front of my face as soon as I put on my Google Glasses?
- hightowerman 13y agoI really think that we are in a period of fundamental change regarding information. The norm has been that we find information, but increasingly information is finding us. While I don't feel the technology is quite there yet, it's only a matter of time before recommendation/predictive systems reach a level where they are able to personalise everything that we interact with.
- 1337biz 13y agoJudging by Amazon's ability to suggest relevant products to my taste those predictive analytics still feel very dull. Maybe one shiny day, but it seems like a long road aheady of us.
- hightowerman 13y agoI agree that amazon suggestions are not great, but Amazon have a fairly limited set of information to go by - only your previous purchase and search history on that site. If Amazon had the same amount of information that Google/Facebook has, they would be able to make much better recommendations. As an aside, Amazon should really have an 'I already bought this somewhere else' button. 6 months after searching on Amazon for a watch but then buying it elsewhere, I'm still getting watch suggestions...
- jere 13y agoKind of amusing how the most consistent theme I could find (in the US at least) was people searching for the weather.
- tankbot 13y agoReally? For me it was the Pirate Bay and Kate Upton.
- balabaster 13y agoI was just randomly clicking the searches to see what could possibly be so interesting about them... turns out it was just a bunch of people wearing clothes... and given the internet, I find that quite difficult to believe.
- clarkmoody 13y agoI'm getting a few broad categories: Weather Golf Basketball Celebrity gossip TV show It would be interesting to see what HN readers are searching. Rather, it would be interesting to segment further into what a specific region / group is searching. Edit: I was just searching for Markdown on Hacker News[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc
- bobsoap 13y agoI don't have any evidence to support this, but I can't believe they wouldn't have any filters in place to weed out all the nasty stuff people are googling.
- tapatio 13y agoThey must be filtering out searches from Utah.
- durkie 13y agoDon't they have something like this in the main entrance of their mountain view office? I could've sworn it was not filtered too, that i vaguely recall seeing something like "how to kill yourself" scroll by when I was standing in the lobby once.
- ripter 13y agoWWDC iOS7 PS4 vs Xbox One Yup I'm still in the loop.
- sheldor 13y agoThe typing of the complete address within google (e.x. weather.com) instead of the address bar still amuses me.
- lucaspiller 13y agoIs this what the NSA uses?
- jrabone 13y agoI love the way that the various ISP blocks on The Pirate Bay have resulted in people apparently using Google search as an abstraction layer over the DNS. How long before the search equivalent of DNSSEC?
- eli 13y agoI would be careful about making assumptions about people's motivation. Lots of people use Google as their primary means of navigating the internet -- nothing to do with censorship. I would guess that a Google search for "facebook.com" is one of the biggest referrers to Facebook.
- JimmaDaRustla 13y agoAnyone else thing this is fake? I keep seeing the same endless repetitive searches. "NHL Playoffs" "Apple iOS 7" "MacBook Air" "Chicago Blackhawks" Nice try Apple/NHL!
- film42 13y agoApparently it's updated hourly from: http://hawttrends.appspot.com/api/terms/ http://hawttrends.appspot.com/api/terms/ If you watch Chrome's network activity, it shows no activity after load, and near the bottom, you find that list of terms. Still a cool visualization. It would be great if it was OpenGL and I could set it as my screensaver, or something.
- k2xl 13y agoNote that this is not actually real time. There is one http request made when page loads and it doesn't make any more requests afterwards (just cycles). It seems to just grab top X words from different languages then repeat them.
- eli 13y agoTop X words among recent searches for that language, you mean? I assure you that "Blackhawks" is not a common English word and suggests to me the data is was generated relatively recently.
- bostonpete 13y agoThe URL indicates that it's the "hot trends", which implies that it's the currently popular searches. I agree, there's nothing here that seems to indicate that this is showing real-time searches. It's just a way to visualize the current hot search terms.
- c0ff 13y agoThe site isn't making any asynchronous requests, so there really is no "real time" aspect to this. If you look at the bottom of the page, it says "Showing the latest hot searches in All Regions". So, these are just the top X searches from some time period, presumably after some processing and filtering (NSFW results eliminated, capitalization and spelling corrected, maybe some categories omitted, etc).
- balabaster 13y agoI refuse to believe there's that many people doing searches in this "real time" search list and there's nothing pornographic...
- dlhavema 13y agothey could easily have a filter setup to make it more "public-friendly"
- ChuckMcM 13y agoWhen I worked at Google there were projectors in the lobby which projected a sampling of queries coming through in "real time." And like you I noticed that there weren't any queries for things I knew people were querying for, so like any curious Googler I went out and found the source code for the program that did that, and yes, as you would expect, it filters out the naughty bits. (and various other searches that are attempted and of dubious moral value). At Blekko (where I currently work) I wrote a similar application so that we could watch searches, live, on our display monitors. It has been invaluable in identifying robotic searches and amusing to watch how some folks mangle the english language in their quest for porn, but most interestingly for me is that it is a great way to train your urban dictionary app since the OED doesn't define 'underass' but if you look at the pages that contain the term you can compute what folks take it to mean ;-), and then you can add it to the filter list.
- jdeisenberg 13y agoI'm still a bit astonished by the number of times I've seen searches in the United States for "weather.com". Searches for "National Weather Service" I can understand, but "weather.com"?!
- viraptor 13y agoThere's a huge number of people that either don't understand or do not care about the difference between the search bar and the address bar. I've seen this many, many times already. And since it gives them the right result anyway... why should they change anything?
- rafadc 13y agoHeavy filtering... no typos ;)
- cupcake-unicorn 13y agoUgh, how do they thing the timing of releasing this webpage is appropriate, with the NSA scandal, and people are worried more than ever about their data being harvested? Or has it been around for a while?
- jpatokal 13y agoThe same program has been running in many Google lobbies for years now.
- mgraczyk 13y agoWhen I interviewed at Google this was running on a large LCD panel in the lobby. It was EXTREMELY laggy on that panel for some reason but it looks great now.
- myohan 13y agothis is not real time...it just pulls a whole bunch of data at once and makes it look like real time with the animations...it is actually animating the same data on page refresh and displaying them randomly to simulate real time...idk how often it's updated though....
- jonstokes 13y agoTrue story: A few years ago, Google had screens in their lobbies showing real-time Google user searches as they came in over the wire. (I don't know if they still have this, since I haven't been there in about 2 years.) I was walking through the lobby with Sergey Brin (it's a long story), and I spotted these screens and asked him if he wasn't afraid that a bunch of porn searches would come up on the screen from doing this. "No", he said. "We have filters for that." Just then, the word "bukkake" scrolled by. "I think your filters should learn Japanese," I suggested :)
- ngoel36 13y agoThey do still have those screens! I spoke with one of the engineers that worked with them, and he said basically anything triggered by SafeSearch is excluded.
- chetan51 13y agoOoh, I would love this in screensaver form!
- chetan51 13y agoI used this to make a screensaver out of it: https://github.com/liquidx/webviewscreensaver https://github.com/liquidx/webviewscreensaver
- rexreed 13y agoDon't believe the title. Even the URL reveals that this is just a visualization of Google Trends, which changes at less than real-time relative to individual searches. Correct, non-misleading title would be: "Nice Visualization of Google Trends"
- mimicoctopus2 13y agoIt's not real time. 3 days ago, the trends it carried have not changed much as I look at it today. While this could also mean that they've actually not changed, I highly doubt that for a country like India.
- mgz 13y agoYou can check what AOL Search users were "aoling" in 2006: http://search-logs.com http://search-logs.com