For those who didn’t know, this feature showed the most active news related searches on the left hand side bar. Adam Shrek has included a picture of what it looked like some time ago. It can also be found on his blog:
Instead of seeing this appearing for users, they will just see the standard news related categories, like Technology, Word News and more. Stacie Chan from Google has said that they know about the disappearance of the trending topics side bar, and “a fix is being worked on” that will hopefully bring the feature back online “shortly.”
For the time being, people will have to just settle with Google Trends.