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Hitwise Intelligence - Heather Hopkins - UK

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Search Terms at Christmas - Nintendo DS tied with XBox 360

November 29, 2005

I noticed that searches for "nintendo ds" had shot up last week and so wanted to update my blog post on gaming consoles from last week.

As illustrated in the chart below, last week the volume of UK searches for "nintendo ds" and "xbox 360" were tied. Searches for "nintendo ds" shot up 57% compared with the previous week while searches for "xbox 360" continued their steady climb, up 23%. Searches for "psp" fell below searches for competitor gaming consoles, with a 5% decline in the volume of UK searches compared with last week. With the Xbox 360 due to go on sale in the UK on Friday, interest among consumers seems surprisingly low. By contrast, as you can see from the chart below, in the lead-up to the release of the PSP in the UK, the volume of searches spiked significantly.

However, we continue to see a very different story when charting search term breadth (the total volume of terms that include the keyword) for "nintendo", "psp" and "xbox". Measured by search term breadth, searches that include the word "xbox" overtook searches that include the word "psp". Each of these receives more than two times the volume of "nintendo".

Nintendo Xbox and PSP Searches.png