December 28, 2005

SNL Chronicles of Narnia Rap causes YouTube to Overtake Google Video Search

Video Search has continued to take off since my post on the Chinese Students Singing Backstreet Boys. Visits to Google Video search have increased by 48% for the week ending 12/24/05 compared to the week of that post (week ending 11/12/05), and visits to Yahoo! Video Search were up 14% in the same period.

But the hot video of the past week was "The Chronic of Narnia Rap," a comic music video takeoff on "The Chronicles of Narnia" from the December 17 Saturday Night Live show. Visits to YouTube, the video search site where it was shown, shot up 83% in one week (week ending 12/24/05 versus week ending 12/17/05) and surpassed visits to Google Video Search. According to the New York Times, "Lazy Sunday," the video's official title, has been downloaded 1.2 million times in slightly more than one week!

Examination of clickstream data for YouTube reveals the viral nature of videos: many of the top upstream sites that sent visits to YouTube last week were either community sites like MySpace or web email services:

Not surprisingly, given the nature of the video and the upstream traffic, visitors to YouTube are overwhelmingly young. For the 4 weeks ending 12/24/05, 45% of visitors to YouTube were in the 18-24 age group. Google Video Search and Yahoo! Video Search had fewer young visitors with 24% and 35%, respectively, in the 18-24 bracket. The younger set is quickly adopting new video technology, and television networks are smart to be posting shows on iTunes and streaming shows on Yahoo!.

Incidentally, if you run a search for "Chinese boys" on YouTube, you get 124 results, which include the other videos by the original duo, as well as dozens of parodies, including Mexican boys, Brazilian boys, Chinese girls, and Canadian boys. Compare this to the 17 results on Google Video. This demonstrates the power of tagging and the benefits of a folksonomy for searching for user-generated content.

Posted by LeeAnn Prescott at 04:30 PM | TrackBack (1)
Posted to Entertainment | News and Media | Search

December 22, 2005

Battle of the Blondes: Jessica Simpson vs. Britney and Paris

Google's Year-End Zeitgeist was released this week, and I was amused at seeing the "Celebrities" section, so I decided to see how the leading sex symbols of the day compared against each other in terms of searches. The top three this year were Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, and Jessica Simpson, who received a greater volume of searches throughout the year than Lindsay Lohan, Angelina Jolie, Jennifer Aniston or any other female entertainers.

The chart below chronicles the lives of its subjects – Paris Hilton's T-mobile account info leak in February, the Carl's Jr. "Spicy Paris" ad in May, and her engagement and subsequent breakup with Paris Latsis. For Britney Spears, this year was all about marriage, pregnancy, and the baby. Jessica Simpson scored a big hit with "These Boots are Made for Walking" video this summer, and spurred a rush on cowboy boots. Searches on Jessica increased during the fall as news emerged that her marriage to Nick Lachey was on the rocks. From this chart it seems that for celebrities, it's a mixture of personal events and professional endeavors that spurs searches, with personal events tending to capture a greater share of the public's attention.

For the sake of comparison, I added in "ipod" - until the holiday shopping season, celebrity searches outpaced iPod searches.

Posted by LeeAnn Prescott at 11:50 AM | TrackBack (0)
Posted to Entertainment | Search

December 15, 2005

Holiday Shoppers Seek Free Shipping and Products On Sale

Free shipping has long been a key offer from online retailers, to the extent that online shoppers have come to expect it. They also search for it, as the chart below shows, particularly during the holidays. We've been finding the new keyword breadth charting function (explained here) very useful in finding trends in searches for keywords that might not be searched for alone. Here I charted keyword breadth for "free shipping" and "on sale."

Searches containing the terms "free shipping" were up 62% for the week ending 12/10/05 compared to the week before Thanksgiving (week ending 11/19/05), and the leading search term suggestions were "toys free shipping" and "jcpenney free shipping" for the 4 weeks ending 12/10/05.

Unlike "free shipping," searchers are unlikely to enter just the words "on sale" into a search engine, but by examining the search term suggestions, we can see what products consumers want deals on the most. For the 4 weeks ending 12/10/05, the leading terms were: "psp on sale," "laptops on sale," "notebooks on sale," "xbox 360 on sale" and "ipod on sale." This list looked very different in July, with terms like "houses on sale" and "cars on sale" leading the group for the 4 weeks ending 7/23/05. While keyword breadth for "on sale" has less of a seasonal trend than "free shipping," it did experience an increase of 38% during the week of Thanksgiving compared to the prior week.

Posted by LeeAnn Prescott at 03:25 PM | TrackBack (0)
Posted to Shopping and Classifieds

December 05, 2005

Keyword Breadth and Home Remodeling

Today I spoke on the competitive research panel at Search Engine Strategies, and introduced some of our new Search Intelligence features that launched this week, one of which is the ability to trend keyword breadth over time. Keyword breadth is the incidence of the number of searches containing a specific keyword as a percentage of all searches. This is great a way to gauge the popularity of a keyword beyond charting the keyword itself (which we do often on this blog) You could assume that if more people are searching on a specific word, there will be greater number of variations of terms containing that word.

Below is the trend chart of keyword breadth for "remodeling," which shows that the number of searches containing the word "remodeling" increases significantly January and June. This makes sense considering the New Year's resolution phenomena, which Bill touched upon in his Thanksgiving entry with dieting searches. In January people pick up a lot of projects that they had set aside during the holiday season. And June, as the start of summer, sees increased activity on "remodeling." As the weather warms and the days lengthen, people seem to be interested in starting home projects. As a bonus for those who already saw this at SES, I've included the top search term suggestions for "remodeling." This is an interesting case in which the variations of the term receive a greater volume of searches than the term alone.

Posted by LeeAnn Prescott at 08:51 PM | TrackBack (0)
Posted to Search

December 01, 2005

Motorola RAZR Phone in Pink and Keyword Misspellings

The share of searches for "pink razr" and associated terms have taken off in the past 2 weeks. While it's not the top term containing the word "pink" here in the US as Heather found in the UK, it is one of the top variations of "razr" and "razor," as shown below. It appears that most of the searches containing the word "razor" are for the RAZR phone, pointing to the difficulty of typing the word without the O, or possibly searcher inattention to detail. The term "razor phone" receives a higher volume of searches than "razr phone," and cellular phone sites rank highly among sites receiving visits from the term "razor," although the Razor Scooter site ranks at the top. I guess not many people are searching for actual razors online.

Posted by LeeAnn Prescott at 12:50 PM | TrackBack (0)
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