If you haven’t discovered Google Trends yet, you’re missing out on some of the Web’s most interesting data and information. At any point you can see what searches are trending on Google and can use this data to compare the popularity of trends over time with nifty graphs. It’s fun to play around with – but wouldn’t it be nice if someone spoon-fed you the popular trends, explaining them each week in a short-form video podcast format? Luckily this is precisely what Google will now be doing with a new weekly video series called Google Beat.
Each week, using Google Trends and Google Insights for Search, Google Beat will briefly discuss the week’s hot web search trends. In the inaugural episode, Google’s Anne Espiritu explains how “salmonela” and “eggs recall” were among the top searches this week. Also among the top searches this week was “jimena navarette,” who won the Miss Universe pageant.
“Google Beat will give you a snapshot of some of the topics that prompted people to turn to the web over the past week,” the company says on its official blog. “Searches can be unexpected, and sometimes what’s popular one week could never have been predicted the week before (think of Falcon Heene, last October’s “balloon boy” or Steven Slater). We’re looking forward to seeing what our data will reveal.”
It’s interesting to see Google get into the podcast world. Weekly tech wrap-up shows seem to be all the rage lately, with Leo Laporte’s “This Week in Tech” podcast being one of the longest-running. Unfortunately for Google, Leo already has a very popular “This Week in Google” podcast which is hosted by What Would Google Do? author Jeff Jarvis and Lifehacker founder Gina Trapani.
Investor and entrepreneur Jason Calacanis took the “This Week in” brand of podcast to the next level with his podcast network of the same name (which he uses with Leo’s permission, of course). Google’s new show brings some very high production quality to the genre, and hopefully it’s just the first of many more shows to come from Google.
