One of the hottest new categories of software development revolves around virality prediction. That is, determining what stories and social media trends are about to go viral.

On Wednesday, Google tossed its hat into the ring by expanding Google Trends and introducing real-time trend information — a tool that could change the way researchers and media channels deliver reports and stories.

The real-time data tool gives users access to the roughly 100 billion monthly searches performed on Google. Available in 28 countries, the tool also merges information culled from Google News and YouTube to form trend reports.

To help explain some of the reasoning behind devoting so much attention to the area of data-driven storytelling, the Google News Lab team posted a video featuring journalists from The New York Times, Vox, ESPN's FiveThirtyEight and ProPublica, all explaining why data-driven journalism is important.

Testing the feature out across a broad range of searches, the data appears to be quite accurate and timely. For example, a search for the Golden State Warriors' Finals MVP, Andre Iguodala, shows relatively little interest over the past week. However, a sharp spike appears at around 11:30 p.m. ET on Tuesday, around the time he won the sports award, with interest waning and quickly returning to previous levels as recently as 8 p.m. ET on Wednesday.

Sports Nerd Sidebar: Interestingly, the top related query was "Andre Iguodala wife," with NBA overall MVP Stephen Curry and Lebron James a distant second and third, respectively. (Based on that odd data point, perhaps Iguodala should be flattered.)

The general Google Trends tool has been available for many years now, but by adding a real-time element to the mix, Google could finally see the somewhat obscure tool gets some time in the data analysis spotlight. You can give it a try here.