As you type into the Google search box, Google Suggest guesses what you are typing and offers suggestions. In the example above, I typed “dallas den” and Google suggested “dallas dentists.”

It works by those amazing Google algorithms that use a wide range of information to predict what you are typing into the search bar. It’s a mashup between the overall popularity of various searches and the frequency of the search. The trending topics make a big difference in how these suggestions are ranked. For example, as of this morning the hot trends in the US are “home run derby 2009 winner,” “the bechelorette finale spoilers,” and “wbcn.”

You can dig down into trending topics to see the search volume index over the past 24 hours. For example, let’s look at the last 24 hours of “home run derby 2009 winner.”

You can see that there was a spike at 8pm (PDT) that trailed off late into the night, but shot way up this morning. Understanding trends like these is important for building your search engine marketing campaign.

Since Google Suggest relies on Google Trends, the current events will guide how people search for answers. If you are an advertiser that sells home run derby memorabilia, you might receive a tremendous amount of clicks over a short period of time, but the majority of those clicks would not return sales because they are visitors looking for news coverage, they are not interested in buying a coffee mug.

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