What this is

Every day, millions of people search for the same handful of names: an actor with a new film, an athlete in the middle of a record-breaking run, a politician in the headlines. TopTrendingPeople shows you who they are, ranks them by how much attention they're getting right now, and puts the latest news on each one a click away.

How we build the rankings

  1. Search trends. Throughout the day we read the most-searched topics in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and India from public search-trend data.
  2. Reader interest. We also track how often people's Wikipedia articles are read, so well-known names are ranked even between search spikes.
  3. People only. Each topic is matched against encyclopedia entries. Events, products, films and sports fixtures are filtered out; people stay.
  4. Editorial review. New names are reviewed before they appear on the site so the lists stay accurate and appropriate.
  5. Headlines. We pull recent news coverage for every approved person and link out to the original publishers.

What the numbers mean

Rankings measure attention compared with each person's usual, not fame. Someone famous with an ordinary week sits below a lesser-known name having a big day, and everyone drifts back down as the moment passes.

The label next to each name says what is behind it: “200K+ searches” is Google Trends' approximate search count while the person is trending; “4× usual views” means their English Wikipedia article got four times its normal daily readers on the latest full day; “52K daily views” is that day's Wikipedia readership when nothing unusual is going on. Rising lists the biggest jumps.

Sources and credit

Short biographies are adapted from Wikipedia and Wikidata, and many photos come from Wikimedia Commons, under their respective Creative Commons licenses. Some profile data and images are provided by TMDB: this product uses the TMDB API but is not endorsed or certified by TMDB. News headlines and summaries belong to their respective publishers, and every link goes to the original article. We're not affiliated with any of the people featured on this site.

Spot something wrong?

If a description is out of date, a name doesn't belong, or you'd like something removed, let us know and we'll take a look.