Given the current political situation in the country, we were expecting to see a spike in searches for ‘iran’ last week. As the chart below illustrates, there were more searches for Iran during the week ending 20/06/09 than for Iraq, Dubai or Israel (generally the most searched for countries in the Middle East) at any point over the last three years.

Last week we tracked over 2,600 UK Internet searches containing the word ‘iran’. Here are the top 10:
1. iran (18.5% of searches for terms containing ‘iran’)
2. iran news (5.7%)
3. iran election (1.5%)
4. iran elections (1.3%)
5. iran tv (1.3%)
6. twitter iran (1.2%)
7. iran protests (1.1%)
8. bbc iran (0.9%)
9. iran elections 2009 (0.7%)
10. iran twitter (0.6%)
As you would expect, the top searches refer to the elections and subsequent protests. The presence of two Twitter-related terms nicely illustrates the amount of chatter related to the subject that is still taking place on the micro blogging service. However, as the table below illustrates, Twitter was not one of the top 10 sites receiving traffic from searches for ‘iran’ last week. Most of it went to more established news sites and Wikipedia.


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