The lead story on My Yahoo! on Wednesday was a photo album from the London Tattoo Convention last week. After perusing interesting yet slightly disturbing photos of altered humans, I found that “tattoos” ranked at number 183 among all search terms, in the vicinity of “thesaurus” and “music downloads” for the four weeks ending October [...]
I was just reading a post on John Battelle’s Blog about the debate between Google and the Author’s Guild concerning the new Google Print website. Google is arguing that posting book text is fair use, while the Author’s guild is of the position that Google is violating copyright law. In his post, Battelle quotes Eric [...]
Last July, “failure” overtook “miserable failure” as one of the leading “Google bombs.” A Google bomb occurs when a large number of webmasters link a specific word or phrase to a particular webpage, leading to a high rank in Google’s results for that phrase. The first organic result for both “failure” and “miserable failure” is [...]
One of the most compelling uses for competitive intelligence in search marketing is a concept that I call critical seasonality. To demonstrate this concept we’ll refer back to the engagement rings example. The blue line represents the market share of visits to a major online jewelry retailer (I removed this sites name from the chart) [...]
I love football season (although this weekend was difficult for me). Having recently purchased a new television, I was intrigued by an email from one of my Hitwise colleagues Shane Mullane, regarding searches on the terms “Plasma”, “LCD” and “DLP”. The interesting news here is that searches for DLP have equaled plasma searches as of [...]
This week my colleague, Kathleen Campbell, upon seeing my previous post on sandals and boots, brought up the fact that Sandals is a very popular resort chain. The January spike in “sandals” I mentioned may be from vacation shoppers, since at Hitwise we know that visits to travel sites spike the first week in January. [...]
My Neighbor Tom Stuart forwarded this great article from Bob Tedeschi at the NY Times that examines a potential connection between sky-rocketing gas prices and increases in online shopping (makes sense). Tom suggested that I pull some Hitwise data to cast some light on the issue. The chart below shows market share of visits to [...]
A reader commenting on my last blog entry Real Estate and Hurricane Katrina, brought up an interesting point… Back in June we issued a press release on a spike in the term “housing bubble.” The question, “what’s happened since, and was there any significant movement in searches on “housing bubble” coincident with the recent drop [...]
In thinking about Bill’s Search Term Pairs concept, I decided to try “sandals” and “boots” to see if there was a seasonal trend. By adding polynomial trendlines to the chart below, a clear seasonal trend emerges in searches for those terms. There are few interesting things about this chart: I was surprised that searches on [...]
While we normally see a seasonal drop in visits to the Hitwise Business & Finance – Real Estate Category (which contains 982 sites and comprised 0.45% Internet visits for the week ending 10/1/05)starting in mid-summer, visits to the category took an unprecedented hit the last week of August leading into September. Hypothesis: Hurricane Katrina and [...]
