Finally, An Alternative to Google Trends that Actually Works: Find the Web's Biggest Trends with Surchur

I've always thought that somebody needs to make a site that summarizes the big things happening on the web at any given time. Google Trends is an attempt at this, albeit the fact that it is horrendous. Well, I think I've hit the jackpot with Surchur, the most comprehensive listing of the web's trends.
Surchur calls itself, "The dashboard to right now," and rightfully so. The operators of the site provide hourly updates to "The Realtime Board", a list that aesthetically shows what's hot. There are two lists on this board: Hot topics and Catching fire. Hot topics lists what's hot right now, while Catching fire lists what's rising quickly. Meanwhile, each listing is followed by a ranking of its popularity on Surchur itself, the blogosphere and Twitter in addition to where the listing is most popular (the feared Google Trends, Yahoo! Buzz, Twitter Trends, Technorati, Bing xRank or CNN Popular).
Also accessible is a "surch engine", which lists hot URLs from blogs, social networks, news sites, media sites and product listings. Users can influence these results by making comments or voting on how good the URL is. And at the bottom, Surchur conveniently shows all the top results from other big "web categorizers" such as Digg, Delicious, Google Blog Search and Newsvine.
Plus, all this is packaged in a clean, appealing template that makes everything neat and easy-to-read. So Surchur is the site and check it out, it might interest you.

Why Everyone Loves to Hack Websites and Software (But Mostly Google)

Let's face it, everybody's wanted to hack a website at one point in their life. Being able to take advantage of a page's flaws just seems so awesome. I mean, wouldn't it feel good to be able to hack such a huge site such as Google. But this isn't some random coincidence that everyone wants to hack; it's psychology.
Hacking seems extremely cool because you are able to feel like you're in control and you've triumphed and have the upper hand. This is especially true during an economic crisis where everyone's only experiencing loss and loss and loss. And this rule even works if what you've just pulled off was just a little trick that doesn't actually do much.
But also, it's a lot like get-rich-quick schemes (or what I like to call online jobs); you have this little feeling in your heart that this might just result in something absolutely incredible that will change your life. Of course, usually, this doesn't happen but easy routes to success never grow old.
And this isn't just some hunch that I have. It's backed up by solid numbers: On the trusty Google Trends (which displays traffic for major search terms in the Google system), lists the term "hack google" with more search traffic than "Mississauga", the sixth largest city in Canada. But here's an interesting stat; 8 of the top 10 countries in searching for "hack google" are part of Asia, with Indonesia taking top spot. This translates to English being a mere fourth in the languages that "hack google" is searched in.
Now, site owners are relatively smart ;) and they've really exploited the fact that people love to hack. People are labelling virtually every tiny little manipulation as a "hack", this Blogger-related site being a testament.
So people, stop hacking!

When Google's Search Statistics Masterpiece, Google Trends, Stops Working

Cataclysm. Halo pet food. Danbury mint. All very cool phrases. All meaningless. All prominently appearing on Google Trends' Hot 100 searches list. Since it's launch as a part of Google Labs, Trends has been hailed as one of the best tools for marketers. I've been making a decent effort to use this service but it just doesn't seem to do much other than satisfying my craving for interesting search facts.
Sure, it'll make you go "Hmm. That's interesting," but otherwise, I don't see much of a use. This is mostly because it doesn't really do much in the means of working as a keyword research tool (don't worry if you don't know what that means) with the constant sight of peculiar search terms like, today, "ice hotel", "in plain sight", "rejuventation pills" and "catching grapes with my mouth" (what the hell?).
In my mind, this doesn't exactly help me in finding something to blog about that people will read. Of course, comparing keywords is always cool to see although only occasionally helpful.
This is mainly because all of the numbers that Google Trends provides are in comparison to the average volume for that search term. This means that instead of giving you a straight number like 10,000 searches in the past two days, the service gives you, three times the average at the time or two times below average at this time (all on a fancy line graph, obviously). This means that often perception would be distorted because sure something can be at five times the normal volume or even twenty times for all I care. Then, you might get all excited thinking that this is a truly hot trend in terms of searches. On the other hand, the normal volume could be three searches every day. So sixty searches every day is what you're getting all excited about. In fact, even the hot trends are based on how much a particular search surpasses its average volume. "Catching grapes in my mouth" happens to "not have enough search volume to show graphs."
That means a possible explanation for this could be tampering. For instance, if "catching grapes in my mouth" has five searches every day (I wonder who these five people are), and some mischeivous computer geek decides he wants to screw Google up, he'll just call all his friends and he and all these people might each search a this twenty times. This would lead to quite a bit of corruption to the Trends. And even if Google tracks IP address, if a prankster's smart, then he'll just go behind a proxy, which hides IP address.
So maybe Google Trends will serve its purpose some day in the next few years and somebody at Google will find a sick new algorithm, but for now, Google Trends will never pass through my bookmark filter.