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Hitwise Intelligence - Robin Goad - UK

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Searching for the recession

January 28, 2009

Now that the UK is officially in recession, we thought it would be a good time to look at downturn-related searches. The table below charts the volume of searches for 4 key terms over the last 12 months, and of these ‘recession’ has experienced the most notable peaks and troughs. Searches for the term shot up last week, as they did during the comparable week last year. The other recent spikes are 3 months apart, which implies that searches for ‘recession’ increase every quarter when the latest data is released.

UK_Internet_searches_for_redundancy_recession_credit_crunch_economics_2009_2008_chart.png

Looking at the other terms, searches for ‘credit crunch’ have increased six-fold over the last 12 months, but have declined from their peak in September / October last year. Searches for ‘economics’ have doubled over the same period, with people obviously realising that now is a good time to brush up their knowledge of the dismal science. However, the most “popular” of the 4 terms is ‘redundancy’. We’ve highlighted growth in searches for this term before, and unfortunately the volume has continued to grow.

Whereas much of the search traffic for the other 3 terms goes to Wikipedia, 62.8% of people searching for ‘redundancy’ over the last 4 weeks ended up at Directgov and, partly as a result of this, traffic to the site has increased by 21.4% over the last 12 months. Directgov is the British government’s online portal, and it sends over a third of its traffic to other websites in our Government category. The table below lists the top 20 Government sites receiving traffic from Directgov last week.

This list contains a range of websites, including 2 related to employment and benefits in the top 5: the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) and Jobcentre Plus. The latter is currently the top job site in the UK, accounting for 10.8% of visits to our Business and Finance – Employment and Training category last week. As the chart below illustrates, UK Internet traffic to the DWP homepage has almost doubled over the last 12 months.

UK_Internet_traffic_DWP_department_of_work_and_pensions_2009_2008_chart.png

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