Awards season officially starts this Sunday when Hollywood’s A-listers hit the red carpet for the 68th Golden Globe Awards.

In the last four weeks searches for terms related to the Golden Globes have increased 73% as anticipation rises ahead of the awards. The peak of searches online for Golden Globe information came in the week ending 18 December when the nominees were announced, but what’s interesting is how much more popular the plural ‘golden globes’ is as a search term than the singular ‘golden globe’ – even though the singular is the official term.

Predicting winners for awards is fairly fruitless task with Hitwise data as there is rarely a correlation between online search popularity and a decision from a panel of judges. But does anyone actually care about who wins the awards – surely it’s all about which celeb is sporting the greatest frock?
According to our search data, the online audience is intrinsically interested in the awards, with 13% of all Golden Globes searches also including the word ‘nominations’ over the last four weeks. However, there were more searches which included the word ‘dress’ or ‘hair’ than ‘winners’ which tells its own story.

The other trending search terms relating to the Globes in the run up to the awards were for Lea Michele and Ricky Gervais. It has been a year since comedian Gervais hosted the awards and actress Lea Michele won her Golden Globe for her role in Glee, but these are the two individuals most remembered from the 2010 awards. Interestingly there was no mention of either Avatar or The Hurt Locker, the two films which contested so many of the awards last year.
Of the websites that received traffic from searches for ‘golden globes’ it’s not surprising to see the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (the owner of the official Globes website) receive nearly half of the traffic. What is surprising is that Twitter should receive so much more traffic than Facebook.

Facebook has become such a ubiquitous part of downstream traffic that its poor performance in this instance is extremely unusual, although Twitter’s strong performance may have something to do with the fact that Justin Bieber will be presenting an award on Sunday. Justin Bieber was the sixth most popular search term driving traffic to Twitter last week, more popular even than the storm created by Kenneth Tong.
Follow Hitwise on Twitter.