No prizes for guessing what event dominated the fast moving search term list in the UK last week. Here’s the top 10.
1. beijing 2008 olympic games
2. olympics
3. craig jones
4. morgan freeman
5. olympics 2008
6. bernie mac
7. beijing olympics
8. sqa
9. john lewis online
10. katy perry
As you can see, there are four Olympics-related terms in the top 10. The top term, ‘beijing 2008 olympic games’ was the Google Doodle term, while the other three – ‘olympics’, ‘olympics 2008′ and ‘beijing olympics’ – were also the 3 most popular Olympics-related terms overall. Below is a screen grab of the Search Terms Variations table for the phrase ‘olympics’ from our new Search Intelligence Version 5 tool. As you can see, when we release this tool to clients next month it will include the paid / organic rate for each search term across all industries. Looking at the paid / organic rate across all the terms containing the phrase ‘olympics’ over the last 4 week, at 4.2% the paid rate was quite low. At 18.45%, the term ‘olympics schedule’ attracted the highest rate of paid traffic. In case you were wondering, the term ‘dolphin olympics’ doesn’t refer to new event at the games, but a free online game.

There are two BBC-related terms in the table above, and BBC Sport was the seventh ranked site receiving traffic from searches for ‘olympics’ last week. The official IOC website was number one, accounting for just under a third of traffic, while the Beijing 2008 and British Olympics sites came next, each receiving around 10%. Aside from the usual suspects – Google News and Wikipedia particular – the surprise entry into the top 10 site receiving traffic from Olympics searches was myPOPKORN, a video site which ranked eighth.
Unlike the other sites in top 10, the vast majority of myPOPKORN’S Olympic search traffic (95.3%) came from paid search. This looks like a good investment: following a slow start over the last couple of weeks, us Brits have finally become interested in the Olympics. As the chart below illustrates, searches for the top 3 Olympics-related search term increased by 552% last week.

Elsewhere in the top 10, ‘sqa’ refers to the Scottish Qualifications Agency, whose site experienced a 208% increase in traffic last week following the release of the Scottish Highers exam results. The increase in searches for ‘john lewis online’ nicely illustrates both the success of the department store’s online operations and the growth of high street retailers online. ‘katy perry’ is the American singer-songwriter who shot to number on in the singles chart last week with “I Kissed a Girl”.
The final three entries in the top 10 also refer to celebrities, albeit ones in less happy circumstances. Actor Morgan Freeman was involved in a car crash last week, while Bernie Mac sadly passed away at the weekend. British motorcyclist Craig Jones died tragically following a crash at Brands Hatch. Someone else who passed away last week was Isaac Hayes, the soul legend responsible for Shaft and countless other Stax classics. As you can see from the chart below, fans flocked to his homepage to pay tribute yesterday. RIP Soul Man.

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