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Hitwise Intelligence - Heather Hopkins - UK

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Ashley Cole Gay Controversy & Google Search Results

March 10, 2006

My colleague LeeAnn Prescott pointed me to a blog post on Search Engine Watch about the Google search results for searches for "Ashley Cole".

Before digging into the issue, let me provide a bit of background. Ashley Cole, the Arsenal and England defender, is suing News of the World and The Sun after the British tabloids ran articles alleging bi-sexuality among Premiership players. Cole's solicitors allege that the stories have prompted internet sites to speculate that he is one of the unnamed players behind the article. Ashley Cole is engaged to Girls Aloud singer, Cheryl Tweedy, and their wedding, due this summer, was dubbed the celebrity wedding of the year by the Mirror.

So how does Google figure into this? According to Danny Sullivan's post at Search Engine Watch:

"Google seems to be clustering search queries and showing search results mid-way down the page based on search volume.

"This is an example of the middle-of-the-page query refinement that Google's been testing over the past several months...

"In particular, what seems to be happening is that Google is performing "clustering," a long-standing technique of grouping pages on a similar topic together. In other words, its sees there are lots of pages about "ashley cole" along with a subgroup of those on the topic of "ashley cole gay.""

As the screen grab on Search Engine Watch illustrates, if you search for "ashley cole", mid-way down the page, you will see results for "Ashley Cole Gay".

I looked at the sites visited after searches for "ashley cole" to get a sense for the volume going to sites grouped in the middle of the page. Quite a few it turns out. As the Hitwise Search Term Analysis report below shows, 9.42% of searches for "ashley cole" sent visits to www.myvilage.com in the four weeks ending 4th March 2006, which was the top result in the middle of the page results when I did this search yesterday.

The question that Ashley Cole's solicitor has been asking Google is whether the results for "Ashley Cole Gay" are appearing for searches for "Ashley Cole" as a result of editorial or search volume. While I can't answer that query, I can show that searches for "Ashley Cole Gay" have been increasing rapidly since the articles were published - and increasing at about the same rate as searches for "ashley cole". This may indicate that searchers looking for information on "Ashley Cole" were doing so after hearing of the controversy.

Tweet Posted by Heather Hopkins at 02:14 AM | (0)