Search Engine Journal recently published an entry comparing the recently launched Google Hot Trends with the more established Yahoo Buzz Index. Both services indentify and analyze the search term behavior of Internet users.

According to the official Google blog, Hot Trends is a a new feature of Google Trends for sharing the the hottest current searches with you close to real time. The brand new service identifies peaks in search term behavior, zeroing in on the fastest rising terms of the day, discarding popular terms like Sex or MySpace in an attempt to document what people are interested in from day to day.

Each term listed comes with the time of peak, trends chart, and an overview of its mention on Google News, Google Blog Search, and Web Results.

Yahoo, on the other hand, has been tracking daily jumps in search behavior for the past seven years through its Buzz Index.  Although Yahoo’s Buzz Index does not do daily archives like Google’s Hot Trends, it does offer search trends by different categories such as sports and television, declining search terms, analysis of data, and the Buzz Log which breaks down daily trends and tries to give reasons for them, writes Loren Baker of Search Engine Journal.

More than being a fun website where you can view the day’s top search queries, Google’s Hot Trends and Yahoo’s Buzz Indez are useful tools which can track the efficacy of traditional or offline marketing. These so-called trends tools will ultimately improve and become important to marketers as they coordinate campaigns across traditional and Internet media.

Jupiter Research recently projected that by 2011, the Internet would influence a trillion dollars of offline U.S. retail spending. While the figure may slightly exaggerated or overblown, it is somewhat directionally correct. Search is the first and most commonly used tool by consumers in shopping mode.

As these trends tools of Google and Yahoo are refined and become more accurate, they will clearly show how consumers are responding to traditional media campaigns, as well as geographically indentify where such responses are arising from. That information alone is incredibly valuable.