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Hitwise Intelligence - Heather Dougherty - North America

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Travis Barker Tops Fast Moving Search Terms Week Ending Sept 20, 2008

September 23, 2008

The Wall Street crisis and potential bailout is certainly top of mind for many consumers, but tragedy sent Travis Barker (former drummer of Blink 182 and star of MTV’s Meet the Barkers) to the top of Fast Moving Search Terms last week. On Friday, Travis and Adam Goldstein (DJ AM) escaped from a plane crash in Columbia, SC that sadly killed the four other passengers. Tragedies were at the heart of many searches last week, following the deaths of Richard Wright of Pink Floyd and author David Wallace Foster. The destructive wake of Hurricane Ike also prompted searches for FEMA.

Financial searches were certainly not ignored after the volatility of the markets last week – ‘aig' and ‘lehman brothers’ were among the top 5 fast moving search terms and searches for each increased substantially as consumers closely monitored their potential paths to bankruptcy.

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There is never a week these days when can we neglect news around the impending election, but this week people were also in the mood for a few laughs. Immediately following the announcement of Sarah Palin as John McCain’s running mate, many noticed her resemblance with Tina Fey. The new season of Saturday Night Live kicked off with the a skit featuring Tina Fey as the vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin, which quickly became NBC.com’s most watched viral video. A surge of searches for ‘tina fey’, ‘saturday night live, and ‘SNL’ also resulted: the volume of searches for ‘tina fey’ jumped to nearly 22x the volume, while both ‘saturday night live’ and ‘snl’ jumped 2.7x and 6x, respectively. Each of the search terms reached the highest levels of volume in the past 3 years.

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