About a week ago, it seems that Google has done and lost a little weight. The Google News home page lost a feature that let you quickly view trending topics on the left hand side bar. Even though it’s been a week since this happened, and reports began coming in since then, Google has just recently replied within the past 24 hours in a forum thread.
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.