On a road trip about four years ago, I heard this great song on the radio. It was unique, catchy, and it stuck in my head. Ever since, despite Googling the lyrics, humming the melody to SoundHound, and poring over Youtube, I still can’t identify it. It’s my internet white whale. What’s yours?
     |
There’s maybe no more raw glimpse at humanity’s exposed underbelly than Google’s annual Zeitgeist, a report that shows what we searched for in a given 12 months. This year, our thoughts ran disturbingly towards death and destruction.
| |
Instead of waiting until the end of the year for Google’s annual Zeitgeist, you can now find out what’s trending in any given month with a new Top Charts feature from Google Trends. Updated monthly and going back to 2004, Top Charts is built on the Knowledge Graph, so it’s smart enough to house related keywords under one term for more accurate rankings. For example, searches for “giants baseball” and “sf giants” would go toward pushing “San Francisco Giants” up the ranks in a sports-related chart. Right now there are more than 40 top ten lists with more than 140 time periods available for your perusal. In addition to the charts, the Trends team has also rolled out a new visualization tool for “hot searches” that displays trending topics in a large colorful layout — as seen below, you can customize it to display up to 25 searches at a time that endlessly shift and refresh, thus consuming our attention for the entire day.
Source: Official Google Blog
Last week at TechCrunch Disrupt, Mark Zuckerberg let loose that Facebook would create a search engine “at some point,” and today the firm snuck in a smidgen of emphasis on queries into the Activity Log. Over the coming weeks, your searches on the social network will appear alongside the links, comments and other actions that are normally aggregated in the feature. Worried that friends will learn of your quest to find My Little Pony pages? There’s nothing to fear as the log is for your eyes only. However, if a particular search blemish needs to be scrubbed from the list, each entry can be individually nixed like posts on a Timeline.
Filed under: Internet
Facebook brings search history to Activity Log, keeps queries private originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 21 Sep 2012 19:27:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Permalink | 
Facebook | Email this | Comments
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
