Google Trends for Hacker News
Trend search tool
Free tool showing topic trends across 18 years of Hacker News comments and helping surface buried articles; critics say data stops in 2019.
Free tool showing topic trends across 18 years of Hacker News comments and helping surface buried articles; critics say data stops in 2019.
23 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 19
- criticize it
- 4
- approval share
- 83%
Recommended in 3 of 13 months
- November 2025: not recommended
- December 2025: recommended
- January 2026: not recommended
- February 2026: not recommended
- March 2026: not recommended
- April 2026: recommended
- May 2026: not recommended
- June 2026: recommended
- July 2026: not recommended
- August 2026: not recommended
- September 2026: not recommended
- October 2026: not recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it doesn’t carry the badge
- 19 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- 4.8 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, met.
- Recommended in 3 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, not met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Finds buried interesting articles
“this is actually a good tool to find articles that are interesting but sometimes buried”
Comment from 25 Jun 2026 in “Show HN: I made Google Trends for Hacker News by indexing 18 years of comments” “This is quite useful at-a-glance”
Comment from 25 Jun 2026 in “Show HN: I made Google Trends for Hacker News by indexing 18 years of comments” Clean, informative, functional layout
“Really beautiful, informative, and functional layout.”
Comment from 25 Jun 2026 in “Show HN: I made Google Trends for Hacker News by indexing 18 years of comments” “The example comparisons made me smile. Well done!”
Comment from 25 Jun 2026 in “Show HN: I made Google Trends for Hacker News by indexing 18 years of comments” Free, valuable, bookmark-worthy
“offers an insane amount of value to people for free”
Comment from 27 Apr 2026 in “Google controls ~25% of global AI compute, with ~3.8M TPUs and 1.3M GPUs” “awesome site. bookmarked for future use”
Comment from 28 Jun 2026 in “Show HN: I made Google Trends for Hacker News by indexing 18 years of comments” Cool tool people were hoping for
“This is great, I was just hoping to find a tool like this”
Comment from 25 Jun 2026 in “Show HN: I made Google Trends for Hacker News by indexing 18 years of comments” “This is actually very cool”
Comment from 25 Jun 2026 in “Show HN: I made Google Trends for Hacker News by indexing 18 years of comments”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Graphs seem unreliable or mismatched
“C# actually just matches C in the graph even though it only highlights C# in the example article titles.”
Comment from 25 Jun 2026 in “Show HN: I made Google Trends for Hacker News by indexing 18 years of comments” “I think these graphs are just too unreliable.”
Comment from 30 Nov 2025 in “The Google Trends Spike Before the D.C. Shooting Raises New Questions”
What people said
16 of the 23 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“awesome site. bookmarked for future use”
“Finally, a way to prove to my boss that "AI agent" is not a new topic”
“C# actually just matches C in the graph even though it only highlights C# in the example article titles.”
“this is actually a good tool to find articles that are interesting but sometimes buried”
“there seems to be no data past 2019 on any of the queries that i can see”
“This is quite useful at-a-glance”
“This is actually very cool”
“Love this, seems to struggle with newly indexed words.”
“Really beautiful, informative, and functional layout.”
“This is great, I was just hoping to find a tool like this”
“The example comparisons made me smile. Well done!”
“offers an insane amount of value to people for free”
“Google trends now has less features than it used to have.”
“nowhere near as good as seeing the actual videos”
“Use Google Trends or the method I will share below.”
“I think these graphs are just too unreliable.”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.