With the season finale of American Idol this week, I’ve updated our chart of searches on contestants to see if we can predict a winner. At first glance, the chart below would indicate that it’s a pretty close race if searches really do translate to votes (see my post on that subject here).

In looking at the Hitwise Search Term Suggestion report this week, I found something very interesting. If you remember the Stacy Keibler effect that I discussed here, it seems that the majority of searches for Katharine McPhee over the last few weeks have been centered around a supposed wardrobe malfunction versus her talent, with the query “katharine mcphee wardrobe malfunction” accounting for over 11% of all McPhee searches (other top searches were “katharine mcphee pix,” “katharine mcphee pictures” and “katharine mcphee yellow dress” (subject of the alleged malfunction).
Contrast that with search terms for Taylor Hicks, which contain primarily queries around his music, songs that he’s song on the show and his previously recorded CD. By discounting Katharine’s searches for unlikely voters (male 18-24) the gap between Taylor and Katharine widens.
Finally, to nail my prediction, I pulled a demographic analysis of visitors to the official American Idol site. Visitors are primarily Female (61%) between the ages of 25-44 (54%) from rural areas (57%). I have the capability of drilling further to understand the musical tastes of the above demographics from with the Hitwise tool, interestingly a reverse search on the above criteria revealed an interest in 80s – 90s rock (Nine Inch Nails, Def Leppard, Green Day, Red Hot Chili Peppers) and country (primarily Kenny Chesney). While neither Taylor’s soul angle nor Katharine’s torch song persona are in the sweet spot for the American Idol demographic, based on the difference in volume on searches for Taylor, and the nature of his search term data (interest in his music) barring anything unusual during this week’s performance I’m calling Taylor the winner.