But you don't need trending topics for that. It can be replaced with a simple search, which is way more effective. Having important news jumping into the trending topics tend to add noise to the search because of the popularity.

I do searches all the time to check whenever Github/Jira/whatever is down, or when there's some helicopter over my neighborhood, or even in major events, but as soon as it enters trending topics it's a bit less effective.

I also thought about just using search. But trending topics let me know if something important is happening when I'm not aware. I still think it's valuable at times, while I also think it may be spammy and should be improved.

I think its low signal to noise ratio makes you ignore it, which is bad. But I think instead of just removing it, spams should be prevented more effectively. Because I know "trending" concept is useful when it works. HN, Reddit and some other aggregator sites have homepages with trending content, of course with varying degree of success.