After a ‘Team GB’ filled month of August, the flame at the Olympic stadium has regrettably been extinguished and we are all returning to a more normal and humdrum month of September. Last month I wrote about the Changing Trends in Search in 2012, more specifically about key trends for the first six months of the year. Here we look at key trends for August.

The total of UK Internet visits to search engines in August was 2.21 billion (11.9% of total UK Internet Visits). As we can see from the table below, visits to the major search engines have actually decreased by 100 million since July 2012. Similarly, visits are down by 40 million since August 2011, making this month the first of 2012 in which we haven’t seen a year-on-year increase in search activity. Has the flame of major search engine visits also been extinguished?

It’s not likely. We still see that Google has maintained its primary role as a major search engine, only dropping 0.02% in the last month. Similarly, Microsoft sites have remained stable and Yahoo! sites have even increased in searches 0.04 %.

It’s interesting that although the Olympics dominated much of last month, Olympic related terms didn’t feature within the top ten fastest moving search terms. Instead these included much more generic sports related sites such as Sky Sports and BBC Sport predictably sites which we Brits went to watch much of the Olympic action. Football related searches such as ‘fantasy football’ also made the top ten fastest moving search terms as we get ready for the start of the new football season. The second fastest moving search term for August was  ‘Prince Harry Vegas Pictures’ for obvious reasons.

If you want to find out more about how Experian Hitwise search data can help your business please visit our website or you can visit our YouTube channel to watch one of our videos. Alternatively you can follow us on Twitter for the latest data updates.