The share of searches for “pink razr” and associated terms have taken off in the past 2 weeks. While it’s not the top term containing the word “pink” here in the US as Heather found in the UK, it is one of the top variations of “razr” and “razor,” as shown below. It appears that [...]
In researching this week’s Holiday Retail Series press release on comparison shopping sites, I was surprised to find “pellet stoves” and “wood stoves” among the leading search terms sending visits to sites in that category. Upon on charting the terms, I found that there was a massive increase in searches on these terms in recent [...]
Today we issued the secondpress release in our Hitwise Holiday Series, highlighting the fact that search is driving 48% of visits to the top recipe sites as we approach Thanksgiving. I decided to take this opportunity to pull out one of my favorite charts that demonstrates the trade-off between searches for Thanksgiving Day recipes and [...]
I ran across this Business Week article today on MSN. The article provides some great fodder for data analysis. In short, Toll Brothers, the nations largest manufacturer of luxury homes warned this week of softening in the housing market. The article’s author Peter McCoy poses some great questions regarding trade-offs between renting/buying and saving/spending and [...]
I received a very thought provoking comment on my Avian Flu post from Declan Butler @ Nature. Declan suggested that I try charting “H5N1″ the technical name for the feared virus to gauge difference in academic/professional interest in the avian flu v. consumer interest. I’ve updated my previous chart with the term “H5N1″ The interesting [...]
On Sunday there was an article about Google in the New York Times in which a Wal-Mart board member was quoted as saying, “We watch Google very closely at Wal-Mart.” In the offline world, Wal-Mart’s vendors are dependent on it for a large portion their product volume, while online, the tables are reversed, with Wal-Mart [...]
I ran across an interesting commentary from Peter Burrows at Business Week Online, where he posed the question “did Jobs kill the iPod mini too soon?” It’s a fair question. In terms of traditional marketing and the product lifecycle, I’d say that the Mini was going strong somewhere between the introduction to growth phase of [...]
I just can’t seem to get away from prom dresses (click here for my history on the subject, subscription required)! While preparing for last week’s Hitwise Search Breakfast, I created a chart on the search volume for the query “prom dresses.” The chart below is an excellent example of search criticality with the insight that [...]
Recently the classifieds wars began heating up, as evidenced by Craigslist asking Oodle, a classifieds aggregator, to stop scraping its listings. Craigslist claimed that the incremental traffic received from Oodle was not worth the burden it placed on their servers. Craigslist has been growing rapidly in the past several years, more than doubling its market [...]
I just returned from my visit to the UK. On the flight over, I picked up a copy of the Economist at the Airport newsstand and was thrilled to see Hitwise data cited in their Avian Influenza – In a Flap article (October 22, 2005 page 82-84). The chart in the Economist shows the combined [...]
