The homepage explained

This article provides details on the Google Trends product, how it works, and what type of trends we track.

The Google Trends homepage lets you do the following: 

• Explore what the world is searching for by entering a keyword or a topic in the Explore bar
• See stories curated by the News Lab at Google that provide additional insights found in the data
  Note: This section is only available in some countries
• See Daily Search Trends
• See Year in Search data
• Find guidance materials about News Lab and Trends

The Trending searches page explained

The Trending searches page shows trending searches around the world. You can click on a story to get more context, like the most relevant articles or trending queries. Trending searches include Daily search trends and Realtime search trends as described below:

• Daily search trends highlight searches that jumped significantly in traffic among all searches over the past 24 hours, and updates hourly. You can use Daily search trends to see what people are most interested in at any given time, and how the searches rank compared to one another.
• Realtime search trends highlight searches that jumped significantly in traffic among all recent searches. The Realtime searches are collections of Knowledge Graph topics, Search interest, and Google News articles detected by our algorithms. The Knowledge Graph enables our technology to connect searches with real-world things and places. The algorithm for Realtime search trends groups topics together that are trending at the same time on Google News and Search, and ranks stories based on the relative spike in volume and the absolute volume of searches.

Frequently asked questions

How do I read the "Interest over time" chart under Realtime search trends?

The bar chart represents the number of Google News articles written per hour and corresponds to the grey axis on the right. The line graph represents the Google Search interest over time and corresponds to the blue axis on the left. “Interest over time” represents search interest relative to the highest point on the chart, but doesn’t convey absolute search volume.

 How are the related news articles selected under Daily and Realtime searches?

We look at Google News’ full coverage of stories. If we find that the stories are mainly about topics that are currently trending, we highlight the main articles in the coverage.

We pull from Google News’ full coverage of stories relating to an event. We then use Google News’ ranking to select the top articles for that Trending story.