by Maxwell Payne

Created on: February 07, 2009

Determining what the popular subjects on the web are at any given time can be a daunting task. Sure there are some topics that are commonly searched for online including subject matter about money, sex, dating, and electronics. But the internet is a vast world of information and what is popular one day on the web might be old news by the next day.

One way to find out the current popular subjects on the web is to utilize free programs such as Google's Google Trends program. Since Google is one of the biggest search engines in the world, it is pretty safe to say that what is being searched for the most on Google on a given day is probably the popular subjects on the web for the day.

Google Trends shows the top 100 search terms (or key phrases) typed into their search engine along with the most popular topics of the day according to the results Google returns to users searching with Google.

For example on February 5th 2009, when this article was written, a quick visit to Google Trends reveals that some of the top 20 'hot trends' or popular subjects of the day included searches for ruth bader ginsburg, madoff client list, eight o'clock coffee, amanda beard playboy, fsu gang, and lost untangled.

If you visit http://www.google.com/trends you can see the latest popular search terms and topics being searched about online. You can even go back to previous days and months and check out what was a hot subject on say your birthday or over the summer.

Google also uses a hotness' scale showing varying degrees of how hot a topic is. I believe the highest this scale goes is to volcanic' to give you an idea of Google Trend's rating system. You can also see when searches for a popular subject peaked on that day as well as what city had the highest percentage of searches for that topic.

To make finding and learning more about the hot topics of the day, Google Trends also will include the top search results for those topics right on the Trends page for the date you've selected.

The popular subjects on the web can vary from day to day and even from hour to hour. A lot of people prefer to visit sites such as Digg.com or Reddit.com to get the latest on hot topics from other web surfers. Websites like Fark.com also post and allow users to post hot topics of the day. Of course even with websites ranking hot subjects and Google Trends analyzing the search traffic, there are people out there who, when asked what the popular subjects on the web are, will simply say pornography'.

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