Whenever you want to take a reading of the current zeitgeist, popular search terms can tell you a lot about what's on people's minds. Right now, for instance, the hottest search terms on Google Trends include "lakewood police shooting," "tiger woods mistress," "surviving Christmas," and "cyber monday 2009 deals." If you look at Trending Topics on Twitter, however, you'll see "Soul Train Awards." I suspect only the first one might make it as a trending search term. The overlap between trending search terms and Tweets is remarkably low (even if Twitter itself is a popular search term). A couple weeks ago I was moderating a realtime search panel when Vik Singh (the engineer behind Yahoo Boss, soon to be an EIR at Sutter Hill Ventures) declared that only 2 percent of all Tweets match trending search terms.

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