Google's Hot trends supposedly tracks only US traffic. However, as shown by the Hot Trends ranking given to the recent Philippine nursing exam results, it appears Google is including Philippines traffic in this "US traffic only" compilation.
Although there's a lot of demand for Filipino nurses in the US and there's many Pinoy/pinay nurses in the US, given the huge volume required to make this topic a Hot trend at Google, it is probably the number of Philippines-based exam takers and family members that pushed this search term to critical mass.
Implications? People who use Google trends to make online business decisions might be getting INACCURATE INFO because it uses non-US traffic in determining hot trends
These online business decisions include, but are not limited to:
blog topics
domain buying based on trends
link building strategies
PPC keyword campaigns
There's tons of other implications. Even shadier ones, for example
http://www.highrevenue.com/uncategor...g-google-trend