Whilst looking through this week’s list of fast moving search terms, one term that caught my eye was ‘great north run photos’. As the chart below illustrates, searches for the term spiked last week (w/e 26/09/09) in line with the increase in more general searches for the event.

This made me curious about the popularity of searches for photos related to big events and news stories. Last week we monitored 16,624 different UK search terms containing the word ‘photos’. Of those, ‘flickr.com photos’ was the most popular, accounting for 0.89% of all searches containing the word ‘photos’. ‘great north run photos’ was actually the second most popular photo search term, while ‘great north run 2009 photos’ ranked fifth. Other topical photo searches in the top 20 included ‘good wood revival 2009 photos’, ‘marathon photos’ and ‘nurburgring photos’.
Given the popularity of photo searches for such events, it’s interesting to see that quite different sites are picking up traffic from photo and non-photo searches. As an example, the two tables below list the top 10 websites receiving traffic from the search terms ‘great north run’ and ‘great north run photos’ respectively last week.

As you can see, the GreatRun homepage receives notably less traffic from the photo searches than it does from the core term. Similarly, Marie Curie Cancer Care was bidding on the core term – presumably to pick up sponsors – but received no traffic from photo searches. One the other hand, the BBC seems to have done well from the photo searches, as has the Telegraph. The Beeb’s success may well be due to the submission of user generated photos – one of the corporation’s social media success stories that Nic Newman described in our recent News and Media webinar.
The presence of The Royal Veterinary College on the second list is thanks to the site’s Animal Care Trust sponsorship page, and shows that charities can pick up traffic from photo searches related events. Similarly, the success of both the Shields Gazette and the Sunderland Echo provides an example of an area in which local media providers can win out over the national competition. Given the popularity of photos and other (often user-generated) rich media content, it will be interesting to see how larger and more mainstream sites adapt to plug this traffic gap.
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