Google Trends counts Foreign traffic as US traffic
 

http://i25.tinypic.com/2yxr6gn.jpg

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

I'm sorry, but I really dont feel sorry for people who dont make the expected profit, because they created content based on what google trends told them was in high demand.

I dont think Warren Buffet spend a lot of time on Google Trends, before making his next invenstment, and neither should webmasters

Serious implications for people seeking to build buzz "remotely"...

That or there's a heavy Filipino population in LA (the city mentioned in that screenshot) and other Cali cities who made the searches. Would that be so hard to believe?

I've got tons of relatives in the LA area and definitely agree that there's a lot of Filipinos in LA and other US cities. But Google Trends usually needs a ton of traffic to make the hot list. I'm not sure if the US traffic is high enough for this very specific search (unless tons of Pinoys in the US are searching for PRC results for their relatives within a short period of time). Point taken though.

I wouldn't have guessed something like that would enter trends either, but it would seem weird if they are accepting some foreign traffic for trend purposes and not all...i.e. non-English terms would be everywhere probably. Who knows though, maybe a glitch or something.