Tweet Following yesterday’s post on the top gadgets in the run up to Christmas, today I reveal the most searched for entertainment products. The most noticable trend is the massive increase in searches for entertainment downloads, which currently outstrip searches for CDs by a factor of 27 and DVDs by a factor of 13. Searches [...]

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Tweet Christmas, of course, comes earlier every year. For retailers it starts earlier than most as they try to identify the year’s ‘must have’ gifts. In order to give them a bit of a hand, we’ve spent the last week analyzing search data in order to make some predictions as to what we think will [...]

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Tweet I’ve written about the impact of Facebook on everything from chocolate manufacturers to banks, and now it seems that charities are benefiting too. Earlier this week I received a invitation from my cousin, via Facebook, to sponsor her for the Great North Run. This struck me as an excellent use of social networking, so [...]

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Tweet Two big music stories have caught the media’s attention over the last couple of weeks. Firstly there was the announcement last Wednesday (September 12th) that the remaining members of Led Zeppelin are to reform for a one off reunion concert in November. This was followed yesterday (September 18th) by the UK launch of Apple’s [...]

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Tweet We’ll be presenting a property webinar tomorrow that will expand on our recent analysis of searches for overseas properties. Today I wanted to share some additional property-related findings to whet your appetite for the webinar. The table below illustrates the most popular UK search term suggestions for ‘flats’, ‘houses’ and ‘property’ over the last [...]

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Tweet This week’s Guardian Siteseeing column was inspired by Sandra’s and Bill’s recent posts on search value determinants. The main similarity between search behaviours in the UK and the other regions is the use of ‘cheap’ to search for travel and holiday products, although where Brits are looking for train tickets, Americans prefer car rentals. [...]

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Tweet Nu-ravers Klaxons were the surprise winners of the Nationwide Mercury Music Prize this week, beating favourite Amy Winehouse. However, it was the ‘troubled’ soul singer that received most of the press attention following her performance at the awards ceremony. Internet searches for ‘amy winehouse’ have increased by 84% over the last four weeks and [...]

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Tweet There are many differing opinions as to the impact – positive or negative – of social networks on other sites, and a couple of recent examples provide some insight from either side of the fence. One positive side there was the news from Cadbury’s that it was re-introducing the Wispa bar following an online [...]

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Tweet Bill is a huge fan of American Idol, although I think that it’s using search data to predict the results that appeals to him more than the music itself. As he points out, the use of search data for such purposes is an art rather than a science, not least because a favourite contestant [...]

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Tweet Bill recently wrote a very interesting Time column on America’s favourite foods. Following his example I decided to investigate the BBC Food website – the most visited food website in the UK – for this week’s Siteseeing column in the Guardian. It turned out that the most popular searches containing the term ‘recipe’ sending [...]

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