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Hitwise Intelligence - Robin Goad - UK

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Liverpool beach ball searches

October 19, 2009

As you might expect, following Darren Bent’s freak beach ball goal for Sunderland against Liverpool on Saturday, UK beach ball-related internet searches shot up. As the chart below illustrates, the breadth of searches for the term ‘beach ball’ (which measures the number of different ways that people search for a topic) increased eight-fold last week.

Of the 193 variations on the term ‘beach ball’ that were typed into search engines in the UK last week (w/e 17/10/09), 155 of them related to Saturday’s incident. The top three variations on the term – ‘liverpool beach ball’, ‘beach ball goal’ and ‘liverpool beach ball goal’ - were all related, while ‘sunderland beach ball goal’ ranked fifth. Other popular searches for the incident included people looking for videos and YouTube clips, attempts to identify the culprit, and a desire to understand the rules relating to objects on the pitch.

The top recipient of traffic from the term ‘liverpool beach ball’ was Goal.com, but there are also reports of a sudden increase in demand for beach balls from Man Utd fans ahead of next Sunday’s Liverpool vs. Manchester United match. We’re currently testing some data that will allow us to get a much more localised view on UK Internet traffic, so hopefully I’ll be able to provide some more info on whether there has been a surge in traffic to beach ball retailers from Mancunians over the next couple of days. Keep an eye on the blog and our Twitter feed for any updates…