brain of mat kelcey

i've been poking around with a simple trending algorithm over the last few weeks and have uncovered a problem that, like most interesting ones, i'm not sure how to solve. the question revolves around discovering multi terms trends. a sensible place to start when looking for trends is to consider single terms but what if though we ended up with three equally trending terms 'happy', 'new' and 'year'? it's pretty obvious that the actual trend is 'happy new year' but what is the best way to express this as a single trend in an algorithmic sense?one approach i've been playing...