Most analysts agree that we are experiencing great moments in the IT industry and especially in the search engine market. I believe there are two main reasons for this:

  1. There is no real monopoly in the search engine market
  2. Social media has emerged as a platform for information exchange, i.e. there is competition at many levels

If we look at social media through the resource-based theory of knowledge, we would say that people in a network are holder of knowledge and that they exchange knowledge by communicating through the social media’s interface. This is precisely a level at which search engines compete with social media. Contrary to search engines that are centralizing entities that keeps track of all the knowledge available on the Interent and help its users in finding the things of interest, social media provides information in a dynamic and decentralized way.

Because of this dynamic configuration, information trendiness is an intrinsic feature of social media. Trending information is one that is exchanged by an important percentage of the social network or in simple words, something that a lot of people talk about. In a world in constant change, having access to this characteristic of a piece of information is indeed very vital. Indeed, Twitter is basically a trending subject provider and has known tremendous growth. Because of the importance of this feature, Google adapts its know-how about information aggregation to the dynamic nature of social media. The little baby is called Google Hot Trends.