by Elizabeth M Young

Created on: July 22, 2010   Last Updated: July 23, 2010

Web writers who want to find the best tags and keywords for pleasing the search engines are always better off when they have good search engine trend analyzers. Even if the goal is not to be the first or the fastest to hit the world with a breaking news item, having good references to search engine trends can always help.

Google trends offers a variety of services that are based in Google search results. From the top search targets of the day, to search histories for any topic or individual, this is a powerful and free tool for anyone to use. A person can even enter multiple topics to get trend results simply by separating each topic with a comma.

Google trends has two columns that show the hottest topics and the hottest searches. By clicking on a "hot topic", the latest news and information about that topic will come up. By clicking on "hot searches", a different screen comes up.

Under hot searches, the status of that search, with "volcanic" as the highest rating will come up. A graph will show if the interest is peaking or has peaked and is dying out. Then there will be related news stories. To the left will be the next ten hottest topics and searches, to keep from having to go back to the trends home page.

Alerts are a good way to get the latest information on a particular hot item that is going to be at the top of the searches or news for a longer period of time. Google, Yahoo and MSN all have "alerts" features that allow the user to get the latest when they know that a news or celebrity item is going to stay at the top of the search trends for a day or for months.

News aggregators, such as RSS feeds, Google Reader, Yahoo news, PressRank and Rocket are helpful in pulling together the top stories from all of the newspapers and networks of the world, if desired. Most can be customized to keep your sources at the home page, ready to give up the latest in breaking news.

What's hot today? According to Yahoo, it is the building tropical storm in the Gulf Of Mexico and the restoration of unemployment benefits. Sarah Gilbert and giant jellyfish are trending.  Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie are trending because of their breakup story lawsuit. According to Google, Yahoo shares are down! Rick Warren's renewed marriage vows are still trending and have not peaked.

In summary, it only requires an alert or a trend analysis to stay up on the latest for any topic, subject or celebrity when the tools and services are known and used.

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