Trending right now

Three different signals of attention sit on this page. The search list is Google Trends data for India: terms whose volume has jumped sharply against their own recent baseline, which is why a cricketer's name appears the day of a century and the word weather never does. The timelines are official accounts embedded from X. The stories at the bottom are the reporting underneath the noise.

Trending is not the same as important, and it is certainly not the same as true — a hoax spreads on exactly the same curve as a result. What a trends list genuinely tells you is what the country is asking about right now, which is often a gap in information rather than an event. When a scheme name trends next to the words last date, thousands of people are struggling to find something a government page already says. Our brief on what a trending search measures explains how the scores work and why the numbers are floors rather than counts.