I’ve been playing around with the idea of Catching Trends for a while now, ever since Google Trends came out, really.
Google Trends is a fairly good place to check out what people are searching for, but it isn’t that good of a marketing tool. I look at it like the Day Trading on the stock market… mostly a waste of time, as far as I can see at this point; but this could be because I simply haven’t figured out how to take full advantage of it yet.
The idea sticks in my mind, however, because I have seen Google Trends used for bringing in spurts of of traffic… by malware writers. By catching the trends, they are able to bring up blog posts and links to pages fast enough that the web sites they are using to infect browsers with malware, generate a spurt of traffic from the search trend.
What this means is :
1) they see the trend
2) they create the blog posts and links
3) the link to the malware page is listed on Google and other search engines
And all of this happens within a few hours.
For the malware people, it has to happen within a few hours, because in a few short hours of their first hit, the server they are using is going to be listed on a set of blacklists as long as my arm and the listing will be removed from the search engines.
But… it does happen… it works.
The rub is, there is no profitable, and legitimate, way of using this spurt type of traffic, in fact, it would do more harm than good, because of the jump in the bounce rate on the web site. So, unless you had an amazing landing page, it isn’t worth the effort in trying to ride in the trends. .. like… day trading.. 
The Early Bird gets the worm, but it’s the second mouse who gets the cheese.
