Get Alerts From Google Trends in Your Inbox

If you're the kind of person who likes having breaking news at your fingertips, but can't always check the various news apps that litter your mobile device or tablet, Google has a new solution for you.

Google Trends, the helpful service that allows Google fans to see just what people are searching for on a daily or monthly basis is now throwing email notifications into the mix.

In other words, you can subscribe to Google Trends and receive emails about what people are most interested in searching for on Google within any particular country, which Google separates into three separate buckets: "Hottest" content, "Hotter" content, and "Hot" content.

If you're a news junkie, you can receive as-it-happens emails whenever new topics grace Google's "Hot Searches" list (per which "Hot" bucket you expressed interest in). You can also reduce the flow of information to just a daily or weekly cut, if you prefer.

Users can subscribe to Google's "top charts" in a similar fashion, which organizes searched-for content by buckets: actors, books, reality shows, etc. Emails will only go out whenever a new "top chart" iteration is released, however — not necessarily an inbox flood every time someone moves up or down in the list.

And that's not all. Google is also allowing users to set up email subscriptions based on customized topic queries, which they can receive reports about on a weekly or monthly basis.

"I'm a Liverpool F.C. fan, so I set up a subscription to get notifications about searches for the team. I don't always have as much time as I'd like to keep on the daily scores, trades and gossip, so Trends email notifications have been a great way to make sure I catch the big news. For example, this week I got an email telling me searches for Liverpool F.C. spiked by 169%(!)," wrote Google software engineer Gavri Smith on the company's "Inside Search" blog.

"Seeing this email I immediately got excited to find out what the buzz was about. Looking at Google Trends, I can see this is the biggest spike in the past year by far. As football fans know, this week Liverpool F.C. beat Manchester City. It turns out this is the team's 10th straight victory and puts them in striking distance of a championship title for the first time in 24 years. Busily working away on this feature, I didn't realize just how big a deal this was, and the email from Trends was a great reminder to tune in," he added.

If this new feature sounds a lot like Google Alerts, it is rather similar to Google's notification service for specific news items. However, it's long been rumored that Google might not be as invested in Google Alerts as users think. It's unclear whether the new Trends subscription indicates that real-time updates about search activity is moving Alerts back into Google's favor or whether it's just one more signal that this other service on the out.