Google has launched YouTube Trends - an algorithmically-generated feed similar to Google Trends and Twitter Trends that will identify viral content people are sharing. There will also be a twice-daily collection of videos called "4 at 4" drawn from the feed and from top video curation sites around the web. There will also be a blog that will explore the videos, trends, and - as YouTube puts it - cultural phenomenon as seen through the lens of YouTube. Finally, there will be a local element to the offering with a dashboard that allows the user to explore what's popular in different cities in the United States and in countries around the world, as well as within specific demographic sets.

Last month YouTube announced that there are 35 hours of video posted to the site every minute. - or 2,100 hours uploaded every 60 minutes, or 50,400 hours uploaded every day. In movie terms (assuming the average Hollywood film is around 120 minutes long), 35 hours a minute is the equivalent of over 176,000 full-length Hollywood releases every week. Or if three of the major US networks were broadcasting 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year for the last 60 years, they still wouldn’t have broadcast as much content as is uploaded to YouTube every 30 days.

With this influx of content, YouTube has been taking steps to help users better search and categorize the videos - with Trends being the latest example.

In November it also introduced a feature that lets user explore broad topics and search terms through suggested searches. Called YouTube Topics, it is a set of suggested topics to explore based on a search tool that uses algorithmic data from tags, YouTube comments and other data. YouTube engineer Palash Nandy described it to Mashable as a "conceptual autocomplete," system that helps complete a search by suggesting the topics the user most likely wanted.