What it can say
"The earliest country-attributed evidence in this cluster appeared in the United States feed."
How it works / signal engine
From raw signal to a trend you can inspect.
What's Happening groups related source observations, scores the movement, and keeps the evidence trail attached. You can see what changed without taking a black box on trust.
Inspect the public feedSignal path
Designed for a 10-minute ingestion cycle
Hacker News
official feed
GitHub
official feed
Google Trends
official feed
01
Normalize
Common fields
02
Cluster
Related topics
03
Score
0–100
If the production data service is not connected, the feed says so. It does not swap in demo figures and call them live.
01
What counts as a signal?
One signal is one normalized observation from one source. A Hacker News story, a public repository, or a trending search query can each become a signal. It is not a unique person, impression, or verified fact on its own.
About 24,832
The prototype number was a fixture, not a live production total.
The early interface displayed 24,832 as a fixed sample count. The current product only shows records returned by its connected data service. When that service is unavailable, the interface shows an unavailable state instead of presenting the fixture as current activity.
02
Where does the feed look?
The default ingestion uses official, credential-free endpoints. Optional Reddit, X, Tavily, and Exa adapters stay off unless their provider credentials are configured.
Hacker News
Official Firebase API
Story title, link, score, comments, and time
GitHub
Official REST Search API
Repository details, link, stars, forks, and time
Google Trends
Official trending RSS
Query, approximate traffic, feed country, and time
03
How is country context assigned?
Country context comes from the earliest observation in a cluster that carries usable geographic metadata. Today, that usually means a feed-level country code such as the selected Google Trends market.
What it cannot say
It does not prove who invented a topic, where an event truly began, or which country caused attention to move.
04
What makes a breakout candidate?
Related signals receive a score from 0 to 100. Candidates below the Global Pulse threshold stay on the watchlist. A score above 80 moves a trend into Global Pulse.
This is ranking logic, not a forecast of future popularity. A strong candidate can still fade as quickly as it appeared.
Velocity
How quickly engagement is arriving, with recent observations weighted into the score.
Reach
Total engagement, estimated audience where available, and the number of distinct sources.
Novelty
How varied the topic language is and whether the evidence spans more than one source.
Compare the method
Start with the research job.
The useful boundary