Washington: Google Trends has long been a tool for journalists tracking what people wanted to know about in the recent past. The function hasn’t changed, but the tense has: Trends now tracks stories in real time, giving unfettered access to what the Internet wants to know in the moment.
The new design mostly follows Google’s own Material Design guidelines, the design language the company announced about a year ago and that is now being used into most of its mobile and web products.
Trends had been largely unchanged since 2012, a helpful but slightly backdated look at subjects people were searching for over the last day or more.
The new homepage of Google Trends is now available in 28 countries and Google says it will add more locations in the next few months.
Google will now also provide a real-time list of trending stories and additional information on the improved Trends search page.
The company says that it has also increased the breadth and coverage of Google Trends data, so user should be able to find information about more niche topics on the service now. The service now also pulls in data from YouTube and Google News searches.
Google said many of the changes in this new version are based on feedback the company got from journalists and others around the world. These journalists and marketers, who are interested in trending topics, can now also download datasets with more information about key trends for their own analysis and visualisations.
(With inputs from ANI)