The first new feature is the ability to retrieve information about a domain or website. All that is needed to retrieve the information is to enter one or multiple domain names separated by comma in the Google Trends search form. Google will then display a graph detailing the popularity of the domain name over time.

There will also be information about the top 10 countries or regions that visited the domain or website, related websites and additional popular search terms the visitors searched for.

Google provides a link to the Google Ad Planner service which contains additional information about each website. This includes traffic estimates, popular keywords, advertising opportunities and ad specifications. It has to be noted that the values are estimates and not the real values of the website or domain. Webmasters who take a look at their own website will notice this immediately.

The second new feature is called Google Insights for Search which makes it possible to retrieve search trends for very specific queries. It is for example possible to get country specific top searches, compare related terms in a specific region in a country (e.g. laptops vs. netbooks vs. notebooks) or to find out when searches for a specific search term are the highest (to find out the period of the year with the highest demand).

These two new options of Google Trends can help researchers and marketers (but also interested users) in many situations from exploring new markets to discovering new product trends.

The What’s Hot on the Web currently features three pages with a total of 50 links and links to many empty pages at the bottom which will surely be filled over time. Even more surprising than the empty pages is that the link to page 2 is missing. Visitors can access the homepage which contains the 20 most popular stories “right now” and then head over to page 3 since page 2 is not visible anywhere.

Visiting page three however displays an url that can be manipulated to be able to visit the second page as well. Simply changing the 3 at the end to a 2 will load the second page with the links 21-40.

Alexa’s What’s Hot on the Web provides another nice overview of some of the hottest topics on the Internet currently. It’s basically similar to services like Google Trends, Delicious Popular or even Digg. If you like those kind of sites you will also like this one.

Update: The What’s Hot page has received slight modifications in recent years. Alexa is still displayed the top 20 list of what is hot on the page. These topics lead to ten web articles about the topic. A click on the topic opens it on the linked website.

Hot Products appears to be a more recent addition. It lists ten high in demand products, again with links to websites about those products.

All you need to do is enter one or more search terms seperated by commas and google will process the request and display the results. If there have been enough searches for the term. The results also show which cities, regions and languages did the most searches for the terms.