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I saw your study when it was released. Really excellent work. I suspect Trends will survive in some form but it has really changed over the last 24 months. I
by hownottowrite 13y ago
I saw your study when it was released. Really excellent work. I suspect Trends will survive in some form but it has really changed over the last 24 months. It's becoming far less useful as a research tool, which seems to be Google's overall trend from transparent->opaque.
- Matt_Cutts 13y agoFor a while, spammers were using data from Google Trends to find new phrases/topics to target for autogenerated spam. See http://www.stopthehacker.com/2010/04/05/google-trends-for-seo-poisoning/ http://www.stopthehacker.com/2010/04/05/google-trends-for-se... for example. The new Google Trends UI is still useful for hot topics (Hey, Oracle just won the America's Cup!), but less useful for spammers.
- jacques_chester 13y agoNot just auto spam; a lot of sites haunted the trends board and wrote stories. The most hilarious example was when 4chan bulked searched for "justin bieber syphillis" and created a burst of stories across the web.
- hownottowrite 13y agoThat's unfortunate. It was a really useful tool. The Hot Topics are not particularly useful, well, unless you want to know what People Magazine is going to print in their next issue.
- gwern 13y agoYeah, I'm a little worried that I'm going to have a demarcation problem when I do the 5-year followup - where Trends will have changed so much that I won't know whether I should consider it alive or dead. Even while I was researching it for its entry, I was coming across all sorts of complaints from different time periods about how the functionality was being constantly chopped down.