A lot of us love video games, and everyone here has their favorite from the latest generation of consoles. We have a game room in our building that happens to have all three of the latest systems: Artem loves Microsoft's Xbox 360, Niv can't part with Sony's Playstation 3, and Corey is hopelessly addicted to the Nintendo Wii. After some serious work organizing the world's information, we like to kick back with a round of Wii Tennis or a trip to Rapture. The problem is that there's only one TV in the game room, and of course only one system can be played at a time. In true Googley fashion, we look to data to decide which console gets first dibs. For that, we used Google Trends, which lets us see what the world is searching for.
Take, for example, a comparison across the systems:
Looks like a pretty tight race. Let's take a closer look at 2007.
Wow, they're definitely neck and neck (and neck) -- the top console could change anytime. Fortunately, Google Trends is now updated every day with the latest information. (Until now, Trends was only updated once a month.) Now we can follow the console race (or any other topic) every 24 hours, whether it's The Office vs Heroes or the candidates for the next presidential election.
In addition to daily updates, we've also created an iGoogle gadget and a feed for Hot Trends. If you have ever wanted to know what the Internet was thinking right now, Hot Trends can tell you just that. Hot Trends shows you what the fastest rising search queries are on Google. Now you can keep track of Hot Trends three ways: by visiting the site, adding the gadget to your homepage, or subscribing to the feed by adding the feed URL to Google Reader or your favorite feed reader.
We'd love to hear about any interesting trends you've discovered. Please send them to us at cooltrends@google.com. We'll feature the best ones in a future post.
