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Hitwise Intelligence - Robin Goad - UK
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Swine flu searches increase 58-fold
May 05, 2009
UK Internet searches for ‘swine flu’ increased 58-fold last week, making it Britain’s fastest moving search term. Of the 10.9 million distinct search terms we tracked in the UK last week, ‘swine flu’ ranked 20th. As the chart below illustrates, searches for related terms such as ‘pandemic’, ‘tamiflu’ and ‘h1n1’ also shot up.
Overall, 1 in every 260 searches carried out in the UK last week included the phrase ‘swine flu’. There were over 23,000 variations on the term, and the table below lists the top 10. The most popular queries related to swine flu symptoms, and even the misspelling ‘swine flu symptons’ made into the top - albeit it with a very low success rate.
Another term that had a surprisingly low success rate was ‘what is swine flu’. Less than 60% of people that searched for the term clicked on result from the search engines results page (SERP). Of those that did click on a link, over half went to either BBC News, Wikipedia or Google News UK. Somewhat worryingly, the term with the highest success rate was ‘swine flu’ jokes. Then again, it is important to maintain a sense of humour in times of crisis, and 99.9% of traffic from the term was organic.
Wikipedia was the biggest recipient of traffic from ‘swine flu’ searches last week, picking up just over a quarter of all clicks. As you can see from the chart below, DirectGov ranked second, although it – like NHS Choices – paid for most of its traffic. Websites in our Health and Medical category picked up 11.2% of all traffic from searches for ‘swine flu’ last week, and UK Internet traffic to the category reached its highest level since 2007.
News and Media websites picked up a further 26.3% of all traffic from for the term last week. As the table above illustrates, BBC News was the biggest recipient, followed by Google News. Of the newspaper websites, the Sun came out on top thanks to it paid search campaign, and was followed by the Guardian. ‘swine flu’ was the 10th biggest search term for News and Media websites last week, making it the top non-branded term by a large margin. News and Media websites also performed well on ‘swine flu symptoms’, picking up just over half of all clicks on the term.
Posted by Robin Goad at 12:00 PM
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In Categories Fast moving search terms | Government | Health | News and Media | Paid search | Search
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Comments
Tom Watscon MP, a Civil Service Minister in the Cabinet Office, has written a blog post quoting our data and started an interesting discussion on the question of whether the government should be be editing Wikipedia pages.
http://www.tom-watson.co.uk/2009/05/what-is-swine-flu/
Thanks, Robin
Posted by Robin Goad | May 7, 2009 06:44 AM
What a surprise!
Posted by DoesWhat | May 5, 2009 12:18 PM