Last week’s recall by Johnson & Johnson of some of its liquid Tylenol, in particular some Children’s Tylenol, products has caused a stir among parents. I was not alone in searching for details of the recall online before I dashed to our medicine cabinet to see if we had any of the recalled products. It was just over two months ago that Johnson & Johnson suffered another blow to its valuable Tylenol brand, when an FDA report indicated it planned to put sweeping limits on acetaminophen (the generic name for Tylenol).
Hitwise search data reveals that searches for tylenol reached a four year high last week, far surpassing the July increase in response to the FDA report.
In doing research for this blog post, it quickly became obvious that there are some major differences in how consumers are searching for information on this recall on the different search engines. The following table shows the top 10 search terms entered into Google and Yahoo! Search last week that included the word “tylenol”.

The search term “children’s tylenol recall” experienced the highest volume of searches of any search term with the word “tylenol” last week. Experian Hitwise data indicate that 79% of searches for “children’s tylenol recall” were performed on Yahoo! compared to 19% on Google.
As illustrated in the table above, the #1 search term that included the word “tylenol” last week on Google was “tylenol recall 2009″, a term which only showed up at #9 among searches on Yahoo! Search. The #1 term on Yahoo! Search by contrast, “children’s tylenol recall” only shows up at #5 on Google.com. This once again highlights that query content varies dramatically by search engine (note, we posted on how qeury content varies by engine for travel queries a few weeks ago). It serves as an important reminder that search campaigns can’t just be copied from one search network to another.
Getting back to the title of this blog post, there are many possible reasons for the differences in queries across search engines. One is demographics. Perhaps parents of young children are more active users of Yahoo! Search. Another possibility is the list of suggestions the search engines offer when you search. This reminds us yet again that search campaigns need to be created and implemented individually for each major search engine.