A Zeitgeist for all seasons...........

From today's Official Google Blog....your choice of Zeitgeists....

For more than six years, we have compiled a regular list of popular searches called the Google Zeitgeist. This has been our way to highlight the sorts of queries people type into the Google search box every day. More recently, we unveiled Google Trends to show the popularity of search terms in relation to each other overtime, and how different cities or regions may care (or not) about the trends.

And today we're introducing a new toy we are calling Hot Trends. It's a new feature of Google Trends for sharing the the hottest current searches with you in very close to real time. What's on our collective mind as we search for information? What's interesting to people right now?

So finally a system that:

analyzes millions of searches to find those that are deviating the most relative to their past traffic. And the outcome is the Hot Trends list.

Blimey, what took you so long, guys...not exactly rocket science

The Hot Trends sounds like Google has blinked and finally followed Technorati's WTF (stands for Wheres the Fire - allegedly). We want our Zeitgeists and we want 'em NOW !!!

Unfortunately,

With the release of Hot Trends, we're retiring the weekly Zeitgest list, but we will still compile monthly lists for each country, and will continue our annual year-end roll-ups too.

So.........no demand for weekly Zeitgeists then....better tell that to the weeklies like the Economist etc etc.