Current Google trends snapshot-
While Al Maliki is being spun as a cautious winner by the US & UK mainstream, the secular nationalist bloc Al-Iraqiya is showing some legs, although lots of claims of corruption, bans, terrorism and an occupation don’t help (not to mention ongoing birth defects caused by the invaders). But as the above image shows, the people of the nation who drove us into this war and occupation remain relatively uninterested in the world around them, imperialism might fleetingly be glimpsed in relation to a marketing event dressed as film awards ceremony (of which many seem unsure of the date & time it takes place) and that’s about it.
PS. Oops I tell a lie, Iraq Election is No. 2 in US topics, though not searches, Oscars of course is number 1.
Ten Percent 
9 March, 2010 at 5:26 am
I was about to ask you what it means to be #2 in “topics” — i.e. are they aggregating different searches? — but I checked myself and Google says:
“Hot Topics are popular topics mentioned in news, or on Twitter, FriendFeed and other such messaging services; Hot Searches are the fastest-rising searches. ”
By this definition, it’s hard to equate a popular topic with a popular search, especially looking at the “mentions in news” criteria.
Given that this is what it measures, I don’t know why Google bothers with this “hot topics” thing. They should focus on search trends (and go back to giving us the top 100!).
10 March, 2010 at 8:27 pm
Well topics will be more of a measure of general discussion whereas searches is purely just that I suppose, but which is more useful a figure I wonder (in theory topics by Google’s definition should represent a better measure of something’s presence in discourse perhaps, searches also tells you people do not know where to find information as well as how popular) and yeah I think the whole system is a bit in flux right now, I think google will reinstate stuff and add new when they figure out what to do with wave and either relax about FB & twitter or buy them!