
Show HN: I built a service to discover rapidly  growing Google search topics - jhow15
https://trennd.co/
======
jhow15
Hey everyone, Josh here the creator. As a developer, I’m always looking out
for an emerging market trend on which to bootstrap my own SaaS product. This
is since market awareness and timing are often so critical, on top of
execution skill of course!

So I built Trennd. Under the hood it continually monitors the web for
interesting keywords & topics, classifies them using Google Trends data and
packages everything as a neat web app where other people can contribute too.

The app itself is built with the Next.js React framework along with Express,
Bootstrap and MongoDB. Next.js was new to me, but made sense since it comes
with so much out of the box, including server side rendering.

Let me know if you have any questions, and any feedback is much appreciated!

~~~
ashelmire
These results aren't filtered in some way? I find it suspicious that almost
all of the top ~100 results are tech related.

~~~
concert-gilled
> I have scripts that are crawling the web in places like twitter, reddit and
> facebook to generate keyword ideas. So the trends that it detects is biased
> towards the corners of the web that I am monitoring. Which skew heavily
> tech!

------
swalsh
This definately has a market, but i'm not sure SaaS is it. More typical
eCommerce products have a "flavor of the day" like effect, where an article is
written in some niche community, and everyone in that community rushes out to
buy the thing. Then a few months later, the craze is over. If you're Amazon,
you can spot these trends easily (because they have everyone's sales data from
the marketplace). If you're a small eCommerce company, unless you just happen
to have that product on hand, and someone just happened to have found you, you
may never even realize the trend existed. Being alerted that there is a sudden
demand for a product, might give you a headstart on marketing and might help
you negotiate a deal with a supplier before the supplier realizes what they
have.

~~~
jsonne
I'm a moderator of one of the bigger Facebook advertising groups that exist.
This caught my eye instantly as the e-commerce and affiliate crowd are going
to be all over it. They love being able to catch trends relatively early. This
product is ready made built for flavor of the moment marketers.

~~~
jhow15
That's awesome to hear!

If I were to build Trennd towards these e-commerce guys, what would you
improve/add/change to make them love it?

~~~
AznHisoka
When I was doing affiliate marketing a decade ago, what I did manually was
watch informercials and jot down the names of all those products. Then
manually run searches in Google Trends to see which ones were spiking, and
create content for those products (ie reviews, guides, etc). Here's an example
of a product that really took off after they did an informercial in 2006:
[https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=almighty...](https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=almighty%20cleanse)
. I created a page for this product and was ranked #1 instantly. Because
nobody else was writing about it.

I stopped doing affiliate marketing so don't know what people do now, but just
throwing you some ideas.

~~~
bluepeter
Per the discussion above, this seems to be a pretty spot-on ID of one of these
"flavors of the day"...!

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dceddia
Very cool! As a front-end dev it's interesting (but I guess also not
surprising) to see React and Vue with very steep curves.

I wanted to try adding Svelte, so I signed up by email, but that doesn't seem
to be working. Then I tried Sign In With Twitter but, wow, it requires an
awful lot of permissions! Among them... Follow new people, Update your
profile, and Post Tweets for you. I'd be a lot happier signing in with Twitter
if it were limited to read-only abilities.

~~~
mtnGoat
yea, or just signing in with an email and password. not sure why everyone
thinks they need to have perms to my other services just to user theirs.

~~~
dceddia
Yeah, I’m not crazy about this trend toward emailing magic login links. I’ve
got a password manager...

------
bluepeter
This is similar in some ways to
[https://meetglimpse.com/](https://meetglimpse.com/)

The key value-add, in my mind, from that product, besides the trend, is the
editorial content they include in the email. Of course, that's just me as a
layperson.

I'd probably dupe their pricing model and approach: i.e., a limited number of
weekly/monthly trends, subscribers get more.

~~~
jhow15
Definitely - the glimpse newsletter looks good and is the same concept of
surfacing new Google trends. I didn't like being limited to just a few trends
per month everyone else sees via newsletter though.

I was looking for an interactive app with 1000 trends I could dig through. But
as you say, then the editorial content/insight for each trend is key value-
add. That's part of the reason I've built in for users to be able to add their
own trends, insights and comments. If we can crowdsource it, then to some
extent we don't have to trade-off quantity and quality.

------
suvelx
Is there a plan to sell the data as an API?

I am currently working with a client who is exploring the options for building
out a similar system.

~~~
jhow15
Selling the data as an API is definitely a potential. I was originally
thinking to allow CSV downloads of the data. Would an API be more useful for
your client's use case?

~~~
suvelx
You seem to have done most of the hard work, collecting the data. I'm not sure
they'd care what format the data was in. Providing it could be expanded to
cover the topics their clients need.

~~~
jhow15
Yeah absolutely - topic coverage can be expanded. Shoot me an email and we can
chat more: josh at trennd dot co

~~~
suvelx
Sounds great, I'll ping you an email sometime next week!

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onion2k
How can there be a big spike in the 'cattle' trend -
[https://trennd.co/trend/cattle](https://trennd.co/trend/cattle) \- but no
corresponding change on Google Trends -
[https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=...](https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=undefined)
?

~~~
jhow15
The spike for cattle appears to be in Google trends for me:
[https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=...](https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=%2Fg%2F122h0nq6)

------
mapster
Is there a Pro version where I can get alerts and manage my keywords etc and
have a dashboard?

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cryptica
It's interesting to see that topics like 'fentanyl', 'opiod' have done up.

Also 'criminal defenses', 'wrongful death claim' have gone up a lot as well -
Perhaps they are related to spikes in searches for plastic surgery topics.

Also it's weird why almost all the topics on the front page are related to
software development. It's like there is some kind of conspiracy to turn the
world's population into software developers.

------
tduberne
Nice idea. For very short time spans, I noticed some "trends" seem to be
seasonal trends ("aperol", "lawn mower"...). It might be interesting to
compare with the trend for the same search the year before at the same period,
to be able to identify those cases (for intance, I cannot see from the graphs
whether Aperol is more or less trendy this summer compared to last summer)

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driverdan
Where's the data coming from? I assume the trends are coming from Google
Trends but how are topics found?

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tw1010
The examples on the front page looks surprisingly good, which makes me suspect
they were hand-picked. Kind of beats the purpose of the app if I'm just shown
trends the author and me already know about, since we seem to inhabit the same
subcultures.

~~~
jhow15
Yes, I do filter out any chaff, since the scripts I have crawling the web to
generate keyword ideas aren't perfect!

Right now they're monitoring the obvious techie havens, but I'm looking to
expand their coverage to be more comprehensive.

~~~
baldeagle
When building a system that surfaces interesting trends, you have to be
careful about curating which historic examples you show. People will craft
their understanding of predictive power based on those examples... but if the
examples aren't representative (i.e. randomly sampled) of the algorithm, then
you're selling people rainbows and unicorns.

------
punnerud
What about also crawling data from AdSense? That way you also get the search
numbers, not just the relative graph.

You see these numbers as part of planning for a campaign. There is also an API
for it.

------
justinsaccount
Many years ago I built a service on appengine to hit the auto complete api
endpoint for every single and 2 letter prefix, as well as things like "how do
I" or "what is the".

It ran for a few months before blowing up the free quota, but it was pretty
cool while it lasted.. Seeing certain things bubble up and then disappear.
Like right now 'lion king' is the first suggestion for 'l', but I doubt it was
a month ago.

------
RosanaAnaDana
So... whats up with: [https://trennd.co/trend/craft-
beer](https://trennd.co/trend/craft-beer)

A peak every April and a dip every December? This seems like the result of
some smoothing algorithm needing ~4 months of data and resetting every year.

This one even more consistent:
[https://trennd.co/trend/airbnb](https://trennd.co/trend/airbnb)

~~~
yorwba
People search for more craft beer before Christmas (because they're looking
for a unique gift) and less for AirBnB (because they get together with their
families for the holidays).

Seasonal patterns in data about human behavior are the norm rather than the
exception. That includes search trends. There are also monthly, weekly and
daily cycles, as well as some that have not quite yearly period, e.g. Ramadan.

------
kmorris1077
Cool idea, but all charts are empty. Hugged by Hacker News?

~~~
jhow15
Yeah - just got hugged!

Upgraded my mongodb atlas cluster to resolve the issue, apologies.

------
Fnoord
I wonder if it would not be more interesting to see the unique search queries
instead ie. the least popular search queries.

(In the spirit of "YouTube videos that have almost zero previous views" [1] /
astronaut.io)

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20432772](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20432772)

------
otterpro
I'd also like to see downward trends, not just growing trend. From the last
page or two, I see some downward trend, like "blog", "facebook", and "gmail".
I don't know if it means the decline of popularity, but it is definitely
interesting to see the declining graph.

------
anarchitect
Brilliant stuff. Fascinating to see how seasonal some of the searches are –
"rosé" and "Aperol" spikes in July and December (southern/northern hemisphere
summers?), "carbs" and "low-carbohydrate diet" peaks in January (when people
want to change their habits?).

------
abbadadda
This is pretty brilliant. I'd hook up something to identify trends with
companies that can potentially be invested in. Could be useful from a publicly
traded stand point (Good ole stock picking) or even VC investing if the
product was rapidly growing and not yet heavily invested in.

------
onion2k
Very minor bug - if a user has an emoji in their Twitter name the default
blank avatar doesn't quite work correctly -
[https://trennd.co/user/5d31d11ce6f3ce02e53269c7](https://trennd.co/user/5d31d11ce6f3ce02e53269c7)

~~~
jhow15
Ahah - thanks for the heads up!

------
fareesh
Is there some open source version of something like this? I would be
interested in monitoring some non-tech topics and it would be useful to have
something with most of the basic features in place to do so, even if it's a
library

------
libria
`Gmail` appears to be trending down but exhibits local maxima right around
Spring and Fall equinox:
[https://trennd.co/trend/gmail](https://trennd.co/trend/gmail)

Now why would that be...

~~~
omarhaneef
I guess the most logical conclusion is that every time they make a sacrifice
under the full moon during the equinox, they get rewarded with more interest
in Gmail.

------
aloer
OT, the chart for remote recruitment looks very cyclic ->
[https://trennd.co/trend/remote-recruitment](https://trennd.co/trend/remote-
recruitment)

any idea where this is coming from?

------
thecatspaw
As a quick feedback, currently the front page has no indication what use
signing up is.

~~~
jhow15
Signing up allows you to add and upvote trends yourself.

But duly noted! I will make that clearer.

~~~
thecatspaw
I figured out the adding trends after clicking on one.

Are the trends on the frontpage sorted by upvotes?

~~~
jhow15
They're sorted by gradient. But you can sort by upvotes too.

~~~
743665Tez0
The "Insight" section needs more attention, Suposedly is for subject matter
experts yet in this example we see uninformed biased opinions.

Examples

1) [https://trennd.co/trend/ketogenic-diet](https://trennd.co/trend/ketogenic-
diet)

2) [https://trennd.co/trend/plant-based-diet](https://trennd.co/trend/plant-
based-diet)

------
AznHisoka
This is awesome. I'd love to have the ability to view topics based on
category. IE. see the biggest trends in entertainment or the biggest trends in
sports players, or the biggest trends in startup brands.

~~~
yoz-y
There seems to be a filter on the top to do just that.

[https://trennd.co/?categories=%255B%2522sport%2522%255D](https://trennd.co/?categories=%255B%2522sport%2522%255D)

------
beardedman
Very cool, but this is essentially not "discovery". There is a heavy skew
toward tech - but niche tech (Notion for example) specifically. It would be
cool to get a broader, less bias perspective.

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terrycody
If possible, I'd like ti integrate with the real monthly search numbers for
each keyword, I can't get it anywhere, only see a trend score, could u explain
a bit more on this?

------
donmatito
That's very neat and interesting; I guess the two questions are \- how do you
generate keywords to search for ? \- how do you filter out noise (or perhaps
you don't filter it) ?

~~~
donmatito
additional question, maybe related to the question on noise : what is the Y
axis? number of queries I suppose but are they normalized?

~~~
jhow15
Yeah they're normalized relative to a scale of 100, as it's Google trends
data. In the future I want to include actual search volume numbers as a line
on the chart too though. Just need to figure out where to get that data first!

------
ericzawo
This could have massive potential with music industry A&R's looking to
capitalize on viral songs. That's where virtually all recording contract money
is going nowadays.

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pengstrom
Looks good, but I miss units on the axis. On mobile, it's missing from the
start page. The units for the y-axis on the detail view is missing (as far as
I can see).

------
genbit
[https://trennd.co/trend/suicide-1](https://trennd.co/trend/suicide-1)

interesting: why spike? why Science category?

------
apexkid
What is your Algo for calculating Trends? I mean how do you say that something
is trending? It is most popular? Emerging? Z-score?

~~~
vdfs
It's probably built on Google Trends

------
freakynit
Are topics coming from twitter trending? Also, can you add filter of industry-
wise topics? Good work btw :)

------
0wis
Curious to know how Your filters are defined (spike, potential, hyper) Thanks,
i’ll follow and maybe use !

~~~
jhow15
Right now spike/potential/hyper classifications are my subjective opinion..
which I hate because that varies depending on the day I'm having and my
specific biases.

Figuring out how to classify them mathematically is next on the to-do list.
For example a spike would have extreme outliers in the middle and hyper would
be over a certain exponent.

~~~
fvdessen
It would be nice if it could discriminate between trends that are still in
exponential growth from the ones that have passed the inflexion point.

------
omarhaneef
Very nice.

Are these all public sources?

Have you considered backtesting it to see if you can get a trading signal out
of it?

------
bonniemuffin
What's the time scale on the x axis? Are these trending over hours, days,
months?

~~~
jhow15
The default is 5 years, but there is a dropdown select where you can choose
from 3 months to 15 years.

------
wolfpwner
Looks like it can be used to discover new form of investments

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throw03172019
Web server down? Anyone else getting it to load?

~~~
jhow15
Should be back up now! Apologies - had to upgrade my mongodb atlas cluster, it
got hugged.

------
chrisweekly
Very cool! Thank you for sharing -- and for creating it! Have you considered
taking a step further in the "open" direction and making it OSS?

~~~
jhow15
Thank you - appreciate it!!

I actually hadn't considered OSS, which part of it specifically would be most
interesting to see?

~~~
janesconference
The keyword generation part, for me

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rootsudo
This is great!

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akl_bh
This is really cool.

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Havoc
Great stuff. Thanks

