Hot Trends watch: Air Force portal

There was a cluster of searches for "afpc" and "air force portal" this morning, apparently because the Air Force website was posting a list of 12,514 promotions as part of its "largest ever virtual promotion release." 

The online release ensures, the Air Force said, "timely worldwide access to all Airmen and their families."

Though this is not the most mind-boggling news in the world, the number 12,500 is an interesting, if incomplete, insight into just how many people might need to be searching a term for it to get to the top of Google's Hot Trends. 

Clearly there are more than 12,500 people who are up for promotion, so all we'd need to know is how many candidates there were, compared to the number of slots. If there were five candidates for every slot, on average, that would mean you could've gotten in the neighborhood of 60,000 people searching at the same time. But if there were only two people competing for each slot, you might only have 25,000. 

Still, I'm going to take this as a temporary sign that it takes tens of thousands of simultaneous searches to move a term up the Hot Trends list, rather than hundreds of thousands, or millions.