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Hitwise Intelligence - Alan Long - Asia Pacific

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A Hurricane, A Black Hole or a holiday in Tuscany?

September 17, 2008

This week's fastest moving search terms are;

1. large hadron collider
2. mobicosa
3. lhc
4. hurricane ike
5. cern
6. hardon collider
7. big bang
8. gunplot
9. auschwitz photos
10. real estate tuscany italy

Dominating the fast moving search terms last week with five of the top 20 terms was the news of CERN's particle accelerator, known at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which was finally switched on and tested.

In anticipation of, and then the news that CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) had successfully tested the LHC and was gearing up for an accelerated testing, search volume increased dramatically and traffic to CERN's website increased 1400% in the past week and 5900% over the past two weeks (w/e 16/9 compared to w/e 30/8).

The idea of the LHC is to try and understanding the origins of the universe, the big bang theory and more, although not everyone is so sure of what they may discover - "The LHC is a discovery machine," said CERN Director General Robert Aymar, "its research programme has the potential to change our view of the Universe profoundly, continuing a tradition of human curiosity that's as old as mankind itself."

The chart below compares the interest level on a a few key search terms currently delivering traffic to the CERN site.

bigbang

The LHC pushed Hurricane Ike down the order. As expected the news and weather sites received most of the downstream traffic from searches around Ike. The leading Australian based news site to receive traffic from searches for 'hurricane ike' was Google News Australia followed by Weather.com.au, with the first mainstream news title, The Age, coming in at no 13.

Other terms that featured last week were the arthritis treatment Mobicosa made from New Zealand's green-lipped mussels, searches for images from Auschwitz and 'gunplot' referring to a local site (www.gunplot.net) for current and ex-Navy servicemen and women.

To round out the Top 10 is the aspirational search for real estate in Tuscany Italy. What's the saying? "when the going gets tough, the tough get going", nice way to go.

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Posted by Alan Long at 10:20 AM | (0) | (0)
In Categories Fast Moving Search | Search | weather