In nine days exactly, the World Cup kicks off in South Africa and already, the event is starting to shape the UK search landscape.
According to Robin Goad, Research Director at Hitwise UK, about 25 000 terms were searched by British web users in the week endind May 29th and most of them “referred to the upcoming festival of football in South Africa”.
The top 5 queries were:
5. world cup fixtures, accounting for 1.64% of UK searches containing the phrase “world cup”
4. England world cup fixtures (1.77%)
3. world cup 2010 dates (3.28%)
2. world cup (3.70%)
And finally, as number 1: world cup 2010 (4.98%)
Experian Hitwise today announced that “Facebook” was the top organic search term in the U.S. during the four weeks ending March 27, 2010. Overall, Facebook related terms accounted for eight out of 30 search terms across the three top 10 lists.
Image by SESConferenceSeries via Flickr
Yahoo! related terms accounted for six spots while MySpace related terms accounted for four of the top 30 search terms across the search engines. Other search terms that were among the top 10 organic searches for all three search engines include “Youtube” and “craigslist”.
Experian Hitwise announced today that Google accounted for 69.97 percent of all U.S. searches conducted in the four weeks ending March 27, 2010. Yahoo! Search, Bing and Ask received 15.04 percent, 9.62 percent and 3.44 percent, respectively. The remaining 69 search engines in the Hitwise Search Engine Analysis Tool accounted for 1.93 percent of U.S. searches.
Image via CrunchBase
In other news, Hitwise reported that longer search queries, averaging searches of five to more than eight words in length, were flat between February 2010 and March 2010. But, searches of eight or more words increased 1 percent.
Google News is worse than average for sticky traffic.
Hitwise has run the numbers on traffic that returns to media sites according to referral site. Facebook is far and away the top returning traffic referrer. Google News doesn’t come close.
Perhaps the newspaper industry’s frustration with Google News is misguided. Ok, we already know it is. Google is simply indexing sites (with the exception of licensed content deals) – and users click to go to the site. Google sends traffic. But the quality isn’t as high as other sites.
Five years ago in February 2005, according to legend, the idea of YouTube was born after Chad Hurley and Steve Chen experienced difficulty sharing videos that had been shot at a dinner party at Chen’s apartment in San Francisco.
Image by SESConferenceSeries via Flickr
Four years ago in February 2006, according to data from Hitwise, YouTube emerged as the market leader from the scrum of online video sites — and six months later I was part of a team that uploaded our first video to YouTube to promote “Hostage: The Jill Carroll Story” for The Christian Science Monitor.
Yesterday, we learned that Google gained while the other lost search market share in Nielsen’s December 2009 rankings. That scenario played out in Hitwise’s data for the same month.
Here’s how the search engines are doing, broken down by certain verticals:
Hitwise also released data on the percentage of clicks according to length of query.
After years of speculation, Apple is finally expected to unveil its new tablet product at the end of the month. There is great anticipation over the new device, with rumors, predictions and punditry littering the blogosphere.
Apple fanboys and girls can’t get enough. They’re turning to the search engines to gobble up any ounce of information about the new gadget. Hitwise has the data:
If you uploaded pictures of your family on Christmas Day to Facebook – or updated your status to dish on all your new goodies – you weren’t alone.
For the first time ever, Facebook ousted Google for most visited site in a day. Or at least, so tweeted Hitwise.
It makes sense. No longer were people frantically searching for presents. The big day arrived and it was time to be social, not searching.
via Mashable
Hitwise is sharing some pretty interesting data about online searches for offline actions. Querying “printable coupons” and “store locator” have soared in recent weeks.
Last year a similar soar occurred, and while the searches dipped after the holidays – a lift remained and stabilized. This new spike is exceeding last year’s spike in a big way.
It will be interesting to see if another lift remains after the inevitable post-holiday drop-off. I’m guessing it will and you’ll definitely want to have pages optimized for coupons and store locations if you haven’t done so.
Hitwise has released data showing how the term “free shipping” trends over time. Not surprisingly, it tends to spark just before the holidays.
Notice how the term spikes even higher as the years go by. Also, Hitwise says the peak for “free shipping” when online consumers are looking for great post-holiday deals.
