Homing in on Hot Trends

After yesterday's wild guesswork on how many searches it takes to get a term on Google's Hot Trends, I got an e-mail this morning from Master Sgt. Kat Bailey of Air Force public affairs:

Regarding your blog on "Hot Trends watch: Air Force portal," there were 62,547 active-duty airmen eligible for promotion to technical or master sergeant during the 2008 promotion cycle. 12,514 were selected for promotion. In addition, you would probably want to factor in the eligible airman's co-workers and supervisor, who are usually searching for promotees’ names as well.

This is a good clue to help us with our Hot Trends ballparking. I'm going out on a limb to say 50% of promotion-eligible airmen checked in to see if they were promoted. And if you add a few thousand family members, you're looking at roughly 35,000 searches. Once again, this is just a guess. I've asked Master Sgt. Bailey to send along some numbers for traffic to the Air Force site so we can further investigate how many people we're talking about here.

Tune in tomorrow...