Google Trends Updates: A Tool You Should Know

Google has just introduced "the biggest expansion of Google Trends since 2012." The Google trends tool is far too often overlooked and with the updates Google just added it's better than ever. Here are some of the best new features:

1. Real-time data...The power of Google Trends is knowing what people are searching for and the more up to date that information is, the more effective. In that sense it doesn't get better than "Real-Time". Dig into this data by selecting any time range in the last week from the date picker.
2. A new story-centric homepage...This feature combines trending topics from Search, YouTube and Google News to give you a fuller picture of what is important across the Web. The new homepage is available for 28 different countries, with more to come.
3. Better coverage for deeper insights...This translates into your ability to Explore Topics or search by more generic topics you're interested in, when before you had to use exact search phrases. This is Google showing off it's knowledge graph and it's growing ability to understand what things are.
4. Curated data sets... "To help you understand the data behind the headlines, our News Lab team examines trending topics every day and finds interesting nuggets of data that bring news stories to life." You can follow them on Twitter or visit their Github page to see published data sets.
5. Beta Features... There are also features in beta right now such as "Measuring search interest in topics", a beta feature which quickly provides accurate measurements of overall search interest. To measure search interest for a specific query, select the "search term" option. When you measure interest in a search topic (Tokyo - Capital of Japan) our algorithms count many different search queries that may relate to the same topic (Tokyo, Japan Capital, etc.). When you measure interest in a search query (Tokyo - Search term), our systems will count only searches including that string of text ("Tokyo"). Further proving the capabilities of Google Knowledge Graph and its strong ability to understand queries and what they mean.

With this expansion of availab...