
What people are googling in real time - bamazizi
http://www.google.com/trends/hottrends/visualize?nrow=10&ncol=10
======
dpcan
Someday, Google will know what I'm going to Google before I Google it.

It's going to see a pattern of what I watch on TV, the websites I visit during
the day, and on my phone, who I talk to, where I go, what I do, the kind of
business I run, the products I buy, etc, etc.

One night, I'll be watching Breaking Bad and head over to Google on my phone
to see what other shows one of the Extras was in.... but Google will already
know I'm probably watching Breaking Bad, and Google is going to know that I've
looked up Extras before, so guess what, my Google home page is already going
to be showing a list of all the Extras that were on Breaking Bad that night
before I have to type anything in.

When I turn on my Google Android phone in the morning, the phone will be smart
enough to know everything I check every morning. I'll see the weather forecast
first, then my sales numbers, probably headlines on Reddit and HN.

When I pull up Google Maps a few days before Fathers day, it's going to know
that I'm trying to find my way to various sporting goods stores, it'll
automatically put them on the map before I have to type anything in.

If I'm Googling before 5am, guess what, I'm looking up the best fishing
reports... it'll be on my Google Home Page.

Or will this all be in front of my face as soon as I put on my Google Glasses?

~~~
narrator
>Someday, Google will know what I'm going to Google before I Google it.

You raise a good point that very few people understand. What information you
receive determines, to a large extent, what you think. The relationship
between inputs and thoughts is somewhat messy, especially for those people who
can take apart ideas and put them back together in novel ways. However, people
of below average intelligence, who only think in analogies to concepts they
are familiar with, have behaviour and thought patterns that are very regular.

~~~
patrickmay
Perhaps there's a market for a serendipity app that occasionally suggests new
experiences. "I see you're out shopping for Father's day -- how about taking a
break for some rock climbing on your way?"

PS: Do you have a reference for people of below average intelligence thinking
only in terms of analogies to familiar concepts? It seems plausible, but I'd
be interested in any studies done.

------
ekr
There's nothing real-time about it. The data
([http://hawttrends.appspot.com/api/terms/](http://hawttrends.appspot.com/api/terms/))
is pulled from Google Trends, but it's certainly not real-time, more like
hourly updated.

~~~
snorkel
I figured as since most people don't type in Title Case.

~~~
pitchups
Actually you will be surprised by how many do type in Title Case. I have seen
many non-techies do that. I have also noticed they do this in almost every
movie and TV show, when someone is using a search engine.

~~~
pseut
That may be, for lack of a better word, muscle memory/reflex for some people.
I found out last semester, when I wrote out lecture notes on an ipad that
there are many words I literally forgot how to spell. I can type them, and I
can write them with a pen, but writing with a stylus is different enough that
it took several seconds of concentration before I could write it down. I
wouldn't be surprised if there are words or phrases at I always capitalize.

------
jonstokes
True story: A few years ago, Google had screens in their lobbies showing real-
time Google user searches as they came in over the wire. (I don't know if they
still have this, since I haven't been there in about 2 years.) I was walking
through the lobby with Sergey Brin (it's a long story), and I spotted these
screens and asked him if he wasn't afraid that a bunch of porn searches would
come up on the screen from doing this.

"No", he said. "We have filters for that."

Just then, the word "bukkake" scrolled by.

"I think your filters should learn Japanese," I suggested :)

~~~
ngoel36
They do still have those screens! I spoke with one of the engineers that
worked with them, and he said basically anything triggered by SafeSearch is
excluded.

------
k2xl
Note that this is not actually real time. There is one http request made when
page loads and it doesn't make any more requests afterwards (just cycles). It
seems to just grab top X words from different languages then repeat them.

~~~
eli
Top X words among recent searches for that language, you mean? I assure you
that "Blackhawks" is not a common English word and suggests to me the data is
was generated relatively recently.

~~~
bostonpete
The URL indicates that it's the "hot trends", which implies that it's the
currently popular searches. I agree, there's nothing here that seems to
indicate that this is showing real-time searches. It's just a way to visualize
the current hot search terms.

------
jmedwards
Nice, is this the latest PRISM API mashup?

~~~
ErikRogneby
Hah! I was thinking the same thing. Kind of timely to release this
visualization.

------
rexreed
Don't believe the title. Even the URL reveals that this is just a
visualization of Google Trends, which changes at less than real-time relative
to individual searches.

Correct, non-misleading title would be: "Nice Visualization of Google Trends"

------
cupcake-unicorn
Ugh, how do they thing the timing of releasing this webpage is appropriate,
with the NSA scandal, and people are worried more than ever about their data
being harvested? Or has it been around for a while?

~~~
jpatokal
The same program has been running in many Google lobbies for years now.

------
gesman
....after some heavy adult searches filtering....

~~~
itsallbs
What would be interesting is their process for filtering out private search
terms

~~~
chli
I don't think you have to do anything about it. It wouldn't be trending if it
is private.

------
maskedinvader
Google does not claim its real time.Its a set of popular trending searches and
it seems to update hourly.

~~~
hornbaker
It only updates _after_ their prop fund trades on the data.

~~~
skeletonjelly
I do wonder if their search engine trends department guys get involved with
this stuff.

------
balabaster
I refuse to believe there's that many people doing searches in this "real
time" search list and there's nothing pornographic...

~~~
ChuckMcM
When I worked at Google there were projectors in the lobby which projected a
sampling of queries coming through in "real time." And like you I noticed that
there weren't any queries for things I knew people were querying for, so like
any curious Googler I went out and found the source code for the program that
did that, and yes, as you would expect, it filters out the naughty bits. (and
various other searches that are attempted and of dubious moral value).

At Blekko (where I currently work) I wrote a similar application so that we
could watch searches, live, on our display monitors.

It has been invaluable in identifying robotic searches and amusing to watch
how some folks mangle the english language in their quest for porn, but most
interestingly for me is that it is a great way to train your urban dictionary
app since the OED doesn't define 'underass' but if you look at the pages that
contain the term you can compute what folks take it to mean ;-), and then you
can add it to the filter list.

------
jere
Kind of amusing how the most consistent theme I could find (in the US at
least) was people searching for the weather.

~~~
tankbot
Really? For me it was the Pirate Bay and Kate Upton.

~~~
balabaster
I was just randomly clicking the searches to see what could possibly be so
interesting about them... turns out it was just a bunch of people wearing
clothes... and given the internet, I find that quite difficult to believe.

------
aren55555
Someone should make a screensaver out of this.

~~~
calinet6
My thoughts exactly... can someone just do this so I can use it? :)

*Update: This works awesomely. Just pop in the URL. [https://github.com/liquidx/webviewscreensaver/downloads](https://github.com/liquidx/webviewscreensaver/downloads)

~~~
aren55555
Arghh not working for me! Shows a Google login page.

~~~
calinet6
The screensaver does _not_ come preconfigured with this visualization.

You need to go into Options, and copy-paste the URL of the OP into the field
there.

~~~
aren55555
Did that... doesn't seem to work on my corp mac.

~~~
calinet6
Huh, don't know what to say.. for me it just works. Maybe you need an admin
user? Not sure. Sorry bout that.

------
myohan
this is not real time...it just pulls a whole bunch of data at once and makes
it look like real time with the animations...it is actually animating the same
data on page refresh and displaying them randomly to simulate real time...idk
how often it's updated though....

------
hightowerman
I couldn't look at that for more than 10 seconds without seeing a Pirate Bay
related search.

------
jrabone
I love the way that the various ISP blocks on The Pirate Bay have resulted in
people apparently using Google search as an abstraction layer over the DNS.
How long before the search equivalent of DNSSEC?

~~~
eli
I would be careful about making assumptions about people's motivation.

Lots of people use Google as their primary means of navigating the internet --
nothing to do with censorship. I would guess that a Google search for
"facebook.com" is one of the biggest referrers to Facebook.

------
Lord_DeathMatch
Huh, nice. They have something somewhat similar in the lobby of the Sydney
office, with a 3d globe displayed on several screens with search terms being
displayed on their origins.

------
JimmaDaRustla
Anyone else thing this is fake? I keep seeing the same endless repetitive
searches.

"NHL Playoffs" "Apple iOS 7" "MacBook Air" "Chicago Blackhawks"

Nice try Apple/NHL!

~~~
film42
Apparently it's updated hourly from:
[http://hawttrends.appspot.com/api/terms/](http://hawttrends.appspot.com/api/terms/)

If you watch Chrome's network activity, it shows no activity after load, and
near the bottom, you find that list of terms. Still a cool visualization. It
would be great if it was OpenGL and I could set it as my screensaver, or
something.

------
c0ff
The site isn't making any asynchronous requests, so there really is no "real
time" aspect to this. If you look at the bottom of the page, it says "Showing
the latest hot searches in All Regions".

So, these are just the top X searches from some time period, presumably after
some processing and filtering (NSFW results eliminated, capitalization and
spelling corrected, maybe some categories omitted, etc).

------
durkie
Don't they have something like this in the main entrance of their mountain
view office? I could've sworn it was not filtered too, that i vaguely recall
seeing something like "how to kill yourself" scroll by when I was standing in
the lobby once.

------
jdeisenberg
I'm still a bit astonished by the number of times I've seen searches in the
United States for "weather.com". Searches for "National Weather Service" I can
understand, but "weather.com"?!

~~~
viraptor
There's a huge number of people that either don't understand or do not care
about the difference between the search bar and the address bar. I've seen
this many, many times already.

And since it gives them the right result anyway... why should they change
anything?

------
mimicoctopus2
It's not real time. 3 days ago, the trends it carried have not changed much as
I look at it today. While this could also mean that they've actually not
changed, I highly doubt that for a country like India.

------
mgz
You can check what AOL Search users were "aoling" in 2006: [http://search-
logs.com](http://search-logs.com)

------
mgraczyk
When I interviewed at Google this was running on a large LCD panel in the
lobby. It was EXTREMELY laggy on that panel for some reason but it looks great
now.

------
mrcactu5
how do they take out all the porn? i'm serious!

~~~
wikwocket
Maybe they remove the top 10% of searches?

------
sheldor
The typing of the complete address within google (e.x. weather.com) instead of
the address bar still amuses me.

------
tapatio
They must be filtering out searches from Utah.

------
chetan51
Ooh, I would love this in screensaver form!

~~~
chetan51
I used this to make a screensaver out of it:
[https://github.com/liquidx/webviewscreensaver](https://github.com/liquidx/webviewscreensaver)

------
ripter
WWDC iOS7 PS4 vs Xbox One

Yup I'm still in the loop.

------
rafadc
Heavy filtering... no typos ;)

------
lucaspiller
Is this what the NSA uses?

------
dakimov
Aren't the search lines supposed to be private data?

~~~
willismichael
[https://duckduckgo.com/](https://duckduckgo.com/)

You're welcome.

~~~
kunai
DuckDuckGo gets better results than Google, especially for research, but I've
been extremely spoilt by Google's extra features like images, maps, and
YouTube integration.

I know you have "bang-cuts" like !g and !i, but it's kind of nice to have map
results show up when you just search.

~~~
jlarocco
DuckDuckGo also isn't very good at troubleshooting queries. For example if I'm
having a problem configuring my wireless card, DuckDuckGo won't return
anything useful, but Google will find some mailing lists and/or forums
answering the same or a similar question. It's getting a lot better, though.

It's great for everything else though.

