Excerpted from 4 Real Time Search Tools:
“Google Trends
With Google Trends, you can trend multiple search terms on a graph to identify seasonality in search patterns and compare terms on a global, country, and regional basis…
Google Trends also shows you the top 20 trending search terms, based on percentage changes in Google search volume from historical traffic patterns. Hot Topics shows you the top trending topics on various social networking sites (Twitter, FriendFeed, etc) as compiled by Google…
Google Insights for Search
Google Insights for Search. Here you can drill down to a category level, specific location, timeframe, and source of search data (straight Google Web search, news search, image search, or product search)…
Bing xRank
Bing has also had a crack at the categorization issue with their xRank tool…
Surchur
Search engines aren’t the only ones that have free trending tools. Surchur is a tool that combines trending data from Google Trends, Yahoo Buzz, Twitter, Technorati, Bing xRank, and CNN to identify terms and topics that are being talked about right now.
Surchur allows you to drill down on each topic and see where the buzz is coming from, and what’s being said on the different types of media monitored. Is the buzz different on blogs versus Twitter? What images are being pushed out to Flickr versus what’s being said on YouTube?…”
