HotWords: good overview of popular searches, but something is missing
Written on May 26, 2008 – 11:26 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Everyday I see at least one new alternative search engine presenting itself as THE new way to find what you’re looking for. Some of them are actually doing a good job, or have an interesting new approach. The problem is though, almost nobody uses these new engines. Only the innovators and some early adopters find the way to services like AndUnite, Eeggi and Faroo. The alt search engines are pioneers, but will they be able to cross the gap between the early adopters and the early majority?
While new ways of searching are coming up, there are also alternatives to other aspects of search emerging. Like HotWords, a site that aims to give an overview of “what the the world is searching for”. After stumbling on Hotwords on MoMB and reading a review on KillerStartUps I figured I might as well have a look on the site. Hotwords lists the top 100.000 most popular searches on the web with trend and ranking reports. Of the hundreds of millions searches - Google alone has 400 million a day -, they will gather data for around 6 million searches per day. Since this is a beta version, Hotwords now “only” tracks 2.5 million searches. Not surprisingly, the most popular searches are for sex and amateur porn sites like YouPorn. Around keywords like these, the London-based HotWords team has developed an incredible set of analytics tools.
Yet there’s one thing missing on Hotwords: transparency. Although they say they’ve partnered up with “several search engines”, yet it’s unknown who those partners are. For all I know, it could be a scam. Therefore, visitors don’t know what they’re missing yet and might as well browse to Google Trends.
However, I do believe that if HotWords developed an alternative search engines section, bloggers and other Internet press would certainly drop by. They’re very interested in what the innovators and early adopters are searching for. Sure, we all know the crowd is looking for porn, but what about those people who predict our geek future?
I hope you like that post!
Do you have a start-up that we should write about? Contact us! Thanks for visiting and hope you come back again!
Email
Facebook
Netlog
Linkedin
Twitter
The Next Web Blog is closely associated with The Next Web Conference which is held annually in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. At this event speakers from all over the world come together to talk about, and show of, the future of the Web. (
By Jonathan Marks on May 26, 2008
Not sure that just having the top-ten is going to be that useful. Great that I know people are searching for “anal” but that doesn’t help me to make better tags on serious content. So they need to make an option to filter out the adult stuff and maybe think about specific searches in categories/genres. If I am making a travel site, I can imagine knowing what the world is searching for within a travel destination (say Greece) would be useful to ensure I have answered the right questions. So I need more specific searches for this business model to work for me.
By the way, I am searching for the date for NextWeb 2009? Has it been set yet? Couldn’t make this years event but I see from the vids that I missed an interesting event that complements DLD, LIFT, Reboot10 etc.
By Ernst-Jan Pfauth on May 26, 2008
@Jonathan, good point. Their FAQ section mentions they’re working on a filter.
By the way, the Next Web takes place on April 2nd & 3rd, 2009
http://2009.thenextweb.org See you there! :-)