We are working on some analysis for a report on how consumer search behaviour has changed over the past couple of years and I wanted to share a fun bit of data that we found. Analysis of search term content, or the words that consumers use when they do internet searches, has seen some pretty interesting changes over the past two years. An obvious shift has been the rise of social media brands.
For example, we found a strong negative correlation between the weekly share of UK Internet searches for “youtube” and “funny videos” over the past two years. UK Internet searches for funny videos started to pick up just before YouTube devleoped much brand recognition in February and March 2006. Once YouTube started to take off, we saw a precipitous decline in UK internet searches for “funny videos” as illustrated in the chart below.

As consumers figured out where to find funny videos online, they changed the language of their search queries to navigate to the YouTube website. Stay tuned for more results from the analysis.