Analyst Weblog
Today is Blog Action Day and, as with last year, Alan Long has beaten me to it with an excellent post on this year’s topic, climate change. I’m taking a similar approach, looking at climate changes related searches in the... Continue reading...
Posted by Robin Goad at 09:40 AM
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In Categories Economy | Environment | Government | News and Media | Paid search | Science | Search | Utilities | Weather
As we pointed out via Twitter on Monday, the fastest moving search term in the UK last week was ‘micro pigs’. These extremely cute little pigs are the latest pet trend, and have already picked the inevitable celebrity endorsements -... Continue reading...
Posted by Robin Goad at 09:48 AM
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In Categories Animals | Fast moving search terms | News and Media | Search
Whilst looking through this week’s list of fast moving search terms, one term that caught my eye was ‘great north run photos’. As the chart below illustrates, searches for the term spiked last week (w/e 26/09/09) in line with the... Continue reading...
Posted by Robin Goad at 11:00 AM
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In Categories BBC | Charities | Fast moving search terms | Local | News and Media | Paid search | Search | Sport
A while ago we highlighted how Google News UK picks up more traffic from searches for celebrities than any other type of news. Last week was a bumper week for celebrity news stories (unfortunately for sad reasons in many cases),... Continue reading...
Posted by Robin Goad at 10:40 AM
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In Categories Celebrities | Fast moving search terms | Google | Movies | News and Media | Search | TV
I recently blogged about changing Internet usage habits in the UK, and specifically about the shift from transactional to content based websites. Within that mix, it is typically the growth of newer areas - such as social networks and video... Continue reading...
Posted by Robin Goad at 01:20 PM
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In Categories BBC | Demographics | Email | Experian | Mosaic lifestyle | News and Media
Amongst all of the excitement about Bing, Microsoft’s new search engine, one element of the new service that hasn’t received a huge amount of coverage is its news search function. Bing News Search offers a similar service to Google News,... Continue reading...
Posted by Robin Goad at 12:10 PM
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In Categories BBC | Demographics | Experian | Mosaic lifestyle | News and Media | Search
The chart on this slide illustrates the percentage of all UK Internet visits accounted for by the largest and most significant online categories – and how this situation has changed over the last three years. As you can see, there... Continue reading...
Posted by Robin Goad at 10:00 AM
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In Categories Blogs | Economy | Financial Services | News and Media | Retail | Shopping and Classifieds | Social networks
Following the tragic death of Michael Jackson last night, UK Internet visits to his homepage increased 17 fold. Yesterday www.michaeljackson.com was the 9th most visited Music website in the UK, and the highest ranked artist homepage. TMZ, the website that... Continue reading...
Posted by Robin Goad at 10:20 AM
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In Categories Blogs | Celebrities | Music | News and Media
Thanks to everyone that listened to today’s Twitter webinar - we managed to reach capacity with 200 people logged in!. If you missed it, we’ll be posting the recording soon and will email / blog / tweet the link. In... Continue reading...
Posted by Robin Goad at 01:20 PM
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In Categories Experian | News and Media | Retail | Search | Shopping and Classifieds | Social networks | Twitter
Given the current political situation in the country, we were expecting to see a spike in searches for ‘iran’ last week. As the chart below illustrates, there were more searches for Iran during the week ending 20/06/09 than for Iraq,... Continue reading...
Posted by Robin Goad at 12:25 PM
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In Categories Blogs | Government | News and Media | Politics | Twitter
Last month I had the pleasure of speaking at the Digital Editors Network forum, an event organized by Francois Nel from the Journalism Leaders Program at the University of Central Lancashire (UCLAN). One of the topics that came up during... Continue reading...
Posted by Robin Goad at 11:40 AM
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In Categories Education | Employment | Football | Government | Local | News and Media | Property | Search | Sport
Bing, Microsoft’s new search engine, was announced by Steve Balmer on May 28 and officially launched on June 3. I’ve held off putting up our initial UK statistics until now for a couple of reasons. Firstly, I couldn’t think of... Continue reading...
Posted by Robin Goad at 09:50 AM
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In Categories Branding | Email | Music | News and Media | Retail | Search | Shopping and Classifieds | Social networks | Weather
Yesterday I received a call from Sridhar Venkatapuram of the London Business School asking me about the online behaviour of students in the UK. I mentioned on Twitter that I was pulling a list of the 100 most popular websites... Continue reading...
Posted by Robin Goad at 02:30 PM
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In Categories BBC | Blogs | Branding | Celebrities | Demographics | Education | Email | Experian | Fashion | Google | Mosaic lifestyle | News and Media | Retail | Shopping and Classifieds | Social networks | TV | Top UK websites
Now that the MPs’ expenses scandal has led to the resignation of Michael Martin, the House of Commons’ Speaker, it seems like a good to provide an update on the Internet data. As the chart below illustrates, searches for our... Continue reading...
Posted by Robin Goad at 04:00 PM
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In Categories Government | News and Media | Politics
The Telegraph’s MPs' expenses story has dominated the headlines for almost a week now. As the chart below illustrates, searches for a portfolio of terms relating to story increased by 575% last week, and our data will likely show a... Continue reading...
Posted by Robin Goad at 09:30 AM
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In Categories Fast moving search terms | News and Media | Politics | Search
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,... Continue reading...
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
As you would expect, last week’s budget received a lot of press attention. UK Internet searches for the term ‘budget’ increased 27-fold between the weeks ending April 18th and 25th. However, as the chart below illustrates, searches for the term... Continue reading...
Posted by Robin Goad at 11:00 AM
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In Categories Economy | Fast moving search terms | Financial Services | Government | News and Media | Paid search | Politics
UK Internet users are spending less of their online time shopping and more time browsing online media. During March 2009, 8.6% of all UK Internet visits went to online retail websites and 9.8% to social networking websites. A year ago,... Continue reading...
Posted by Robin Goad at 10:20 AM
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In Categories Economy | News and Media | Retail | Shopping and Classifieds | Social networks | Video
The Internet is now a key source of info for the majority of people in the UK. Consequently, search engines are one of the first places people turn to for information on everything from celebrity culture to the global financial... Continue reading...
Posted by Robin Goad at 10:45 AM
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In Categories Economy | Financial Services | News and Media | Search
The sun may be shining, but it’s not quite time for the music festivals yet (it has to start raining for that to happen). However, following the release of the Reading and Leeds Festival line-ups in the NME last week,... Continue reading...
Posted by Robin Goad at 10:00 AM
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In Categories Music | News and Media | Retail | Search | Shopping and Classifieds
Last week it was reported that Google is in talks to purchase Twitter. Therefore, now seems like a good time to revisit some of the stats, starting with the top level traffic figures. As the chart below illustrates, UK Internet... Continue reading...
Posted by Robin Goad at 03:00 PM
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In Categories Blogs | Government | News and Media | Retail | Search | Shopping and Classifieds | Social networks | Twitter
It is generally accepted that his campaign team’s use of social media contributed to Barack Obama’s victory in last year’s American presidential election. But over on this side of the pond, politicians have been much slower to grasp the nettle... Continue reading...
Posted by Robin Goad at 09:00 AM
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In Categories Blogs | Celebrities | News and Media | Politics | Search | Social networks | Video
Last week we revealed that Twitter had overtaken Google News in the UK. However, although everyone’s favourite micro-blogging service receives more UK Internet visits, Google News remains the greater source of traffic for News and Media websites. As the chart... Continue reading...
Posted by Robin Goad at 10:00 AM
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In Categories Celebrities | Football | Gadgets | Google | Movies | Music | News and Media | Politics | Search | Sport | TV | Twitter | Weather
Last week (w/e 14/03/09) Twitter.com was the 54th most visited website in the UK, up from 66th the week before. One consequence of Twitter rapid rise up the rankings is that the micro-blogging service has now overtaken most of the... Continue reading...
Posted by Robin Goad at 12:00 PM
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In Categories Blogs | News and Media | Social networks | Twitter
For our second guest posting on the UK blog, I’d like to hand over to Richard Seymour, Hitwise UK Client Intelligence Analyst, to take us through some of the research he has carried out recently on UK Search Engines. For... Continue reading...
Posted by Robin Goad at 02:18 PM
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In Categories Football | Games | Google | Guest posts | News and Media | Search | Social networks | Sport | TV | Travel
Britain’s favourite social network and the second most visited website in the UK after Google, is also the most searched-for brand by UK Internet users. During the 12 weeks ending 3 January 2009, 1 in every 42 Internet searches in... Continue reading...
Posted by Robin Goad at 08:00 AM
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In Categories BBC | Branding | Demographics | Google | News and Media | Retail | Search | Shopping and Classifieds | Social networks
According to Journalism.co.uk, the Sun’s February 13th story about the 13 year old ‘baby father’ Alfie Patten became the newspaper’s most popular online article of all time. As the chart below illustrates, the Sun’s market share of UK Internet visits... Continue reading...
Posted by Robin Goad at 09:30 AM
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In Categories News and Media | Search | Social networks
Martin Lewis, creator of the “consumer revenge” website Money Saving Expert was the most searched-for personality by UK Internet users during the 12 weeks ending January 3 2009. There were 11% more searches for Martin Lewis than US President Barack... Continue reading...
Posted by Robin Goad at 07:40 AM
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In Categories Celebrities | Economy | Financial Services | Government | Movies | Music | News and Media | Politics | Search | Social networks | TV
The Telegraph recently ran an excellent story that included our recent Twitter data. While reading the article I noticed the Digg widget illustrated in the picture below on the newspaper’s homepage. Launched last October it lists the most ‘dugg’ Telegraph... Continue reading...
Posted by Robin Goad at 10:00 AM
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In Categories BBC | News and Media | Social networks
Following Heather’s post yesterday on Twitter overtaking Digg in the US, here is some UK data on the most talked about website of the moment: UK Internet traffic to the site has increased 10-fold over past last 12 months. For... Continue reading...
Posted by Robin Goad at 10:00 AM
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In Categories BBC | Blogs | Demographics | Google | Humour | News and Media | Politics | Social networks | Sport | TV | Twitter
The US presidential election was a global media event, and Barack Obama’s historic victory caused a spike in traffic to news websites in the UK. Here is a list of the 10 most visited in the News and Media websites... Continue reading...
Posted by Robin Goad at 07:30 PM
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In Categories BBC | News and Media | Politics | TV
After months of campaigning, Americans are today finally voting for the 44th president of their country. The US research team have been doing a great job monitoring search behaviour across the pond, so I thought I’d have a look at... Continue reading...
Posted by Robin Goad at 07:30 AM
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In Categories News and Media | Politics | Search | Social networks
The annual pre-Christmas battle for Saturday night tea time TV supremacy is well under way. In the red corner: ITV’s The X Factor, with Cheryl Cole replacing Sharon Osbourne on the judging panel. In the blue corner: the BBC’s Strictly... Continue reading...
Posted by Robin Goad at 10:00 AM
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In Categories BBC | Celebrities | Demographics | News and Media | Search | TV | Video | Women
Last month we showed how traffic to House and Garden retail websites has been increasing, despite – or, perhaps more accurately, because of - the credit crunch. Both DIY and furniture retailers are benefitting from this boom, but what about... Continue reading...
Posted by Robin Goad at 01:00 PM
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In Categories News and Media | Property | Weather
After we published our blog post on news aggregators last month, one commenter asked why we hadn’t included Yahoo! News? I answered that Yahoo’s News service is different from Google’s because is contains its own content, rather than links to... Continue reading...
Posted by Robin Goad at 02:30 PM
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In Categories Email | Google | News and Media
Is Robert Peston - "the face of the credit crunch" - the hardest working man at the BBC? The corporation’s business editor starts his day at breakfast time on the Today Programme and doesn’t seem to finish until bed time... Continue reading...
Posted by Robin Goad at 11:00 AM
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In Categories BBC | Blogs | Economy | News and Media
News aggregators come in many shapes and sizes, ranging from straight forward aggregators (e.g. Google News) to social bookmarking sites such as Digg, Stumble Upon and Delicious. When creating a custom category of the top sites in the UK we... Continue reading...
Posted by Robin Goad at 11:26 AM
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In Categories BBC | Blogs | Google | News and Media | Social networks
We launched our New Search Intelligence tool in the UK today and, amongst other enhancements, it includes additional paid / organic search data. One great new feature allows you to measure paid search rates by industry, so I thought I’d... Continue reading...
Posted by Robin Goad at 03:00 PM
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In Categories Automotive | Financial Services | Government | News and Media | Property | Retail | Search | Shopping and Classifieds | Toys | Travel
We’ve just updated our data on navigational / branded search in the UK for our new research report, Managing Your Brand Online. During May 2008, 88% of searches for the top 2,000 search terms in the UK were branded in... Continue reading...
Posted by Robin Goad at 09:00 AM
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In Categories BBC | Branding | Google | News and Media | Retail | Search | Shopping and Classifieds | Social networks | Video
Never mind the Olympics, football websites remain the post popular sport sites in the UK, currently accounting for a third of visits to our Sports category. As you can see from the chart below, by last week traffic had already... Continue reading...
Posted by Robin Goad at 04:00 PM
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In Categories Football | News and Media | Search | Sport
Using Hitwise data in combination with Experian’s Mosaic lifestyle information enables us to build a rich user profile of a given website or industry. Mosaic is a household-based segmentation system that classifies all UK households and neighborhoods into 61 unique... Continue reading...
Posted by Robin Goad at 08:21 AM
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In Categories Demographics | Mosaic lifestyle | News and Media
At Hitwise we believe that our search data provides an unprecedented insight into what people are thinking. This information has a huge number of uses, from spotting the latest hot band to measuring the popularity of any number of products,... Continue reading...
Posted by Robin Goad at 12:00 PM
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In Categories BBC | Google | Government | News and Media | Politics | Search
The Centre for Brand Analysis released its list of the top Superbrands in the UK earlier this week, with Google taking the top spot after placing third last year. By looking at the profile of visitors to their homepages, we... Continue reading...
Posted by Robin Goad at 03:59 PM
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In Categories Automotive | BBC | Branding | Demographics | Gadgets | Google | Men | Mosaic lifestyle | News and Media | Retail | Shopping and Classifieds | Travel | Women
Almost a year ago we investigated the seasonality of popular recipes. Recent analysis for 2008 reveals a similar pattern, with searches for cake recipes featuring heavily again this summer. However, it was interesting to note that visits to the Food... Continue reading...
Posted by Robin Goad at 11:30 AM
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In Categories BBC | Demographics | Food | News and Media | TV
The two Heathers (Hopkins and Dougherty) have both written about the growth of Twitter in the US recently, so here is some UK data on the micro-blogging service. As you can see from the chart below, the site’s growth has... Continue reading...
Posted by Robin Goad at 02:00 PM
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In Categories BBC | Blogs | Demographics | Mosaic lifestyle | News and Media | Search | Social networks
Anyone who uses Wikipedia or IMDB frequently will be used to the ‘spoiler warning’ notification when reading an entry on a book or film. While notifications in these and similar websites are designed to help you avoid spoilers, there are... Continue reading...
Posted by Robin Goad at 10:30 AM
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In Categories News and Media | Search | TV
Yesterday the BBC reported that Sainsbury’s had suspended its online grocery store, and looking at the site this morning that still seems to be the case. One of the great things about Hitwise’s daily data is that we are able... Continue reading...
Posted by Robin Goad at 11:00 AM
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In Categories Food | News and Media | Retail | Shopping and Classifieds
When Abbey last month became the last big bank to abandon 100 per cent mortgages, it did so in the face of the credit crunch and falling demand from buyers. As the graph below shows, the volume of UK internet... Continue reading...
Posted by Robin Goad at 03:00 PM
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In Categories Economy | Financial Services | Government | News and Media | Search
UK Internet visits to weblogs reached an all time high last week. As the chart below illustrates, Blogs and Personal Websites accounted for 1.19% of all UK traffic, equivalent to one in every 84 internet visits. Taking the slightly longer... Continue reading...
Posted by Robin Goad at 12:30 PM
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In Categories Blogs | Gadgets | Google | News and Media | Politics | Search
Apple is expected to launch a new version of its iPhone at the Apple World Wide Developers' Conference in San Francisco this afternoon (UK time). As with all such events, the speculation amongst Apple fans and foes has almost reached... Continue reading...
Posted by Robin Goad at 02:00 PM
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In Categories Blogs | News and Media | Retail | Search | Shopping and Classifieds
Heather Hopkins recently identified a correlation between house searches and house sales in the US. She compared searches for the term "homes for sale" with actual sales data from the American National Association of Realtors, and found that there was... Continue reading...
Posted by Robin Goad at 04:00 PM
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In Categories Economy | Financial Services | News and Media | Property | Search
Later today the BBC Trust will release a report that aims to answer the question: does the corporation dominate the online news space at the expense of its commercial rivals? As I write this, the findings aren’t yet known, but... Continue reading...
Posted by Robin Goad at 08:00 AM
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In Categories News and Media
The launch of Freesat, the free satellite TV service provided by the BBC and ITV in the UK, proved popular with online consumers during its launch week. UK Internet traffic to www.freesat.co.uk, the service’s online homepage, increased by 627% between... Continue reading...
Posted by Robin Goad at 12:00 PM
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In Categories Demographics | Gadgets | News and Media | Retail | Search | Shopping and Classifieds | TV
The top 100 Google Internet properties sent over one third of all Internet traffic to websites in the UK during March 2008. A custom category consisting of the 100 most visited Google-owned web properties in the UK accounted for 36.55%... Continue reading...
Posted by Robin Goad at 11:00 AM
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In Categories Google | News and Media | Search
A lot has been made about how the candidates and voters for the London Mayoral elections on May 1st have embraced the Internet like never before - at least in British political terms, as this is one area where the... Continue reading...
Posted by Robin Goad at 09:00 AM
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In Categories Demographics | Government | News and Media | Politics | Search | Social networks | Video
Last week Apple and 02 announced that they had cut the price of the 8GB iPhone by £100 in the UK until June 1st. As always with Apple, the announcement generated a huge amount of media interest – including speculation... Continue reading...
Posted by Robin Goad at 08:00 AM
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In Categories Gadgets | News and Media | Retail | Search | Shopping and Classifieds
We have just announced the winners of the Hitwise UK Online Performance Awards 2007, so congratulations to all of the websites that placed within their industry top 10. In addition to the top websites, we also announced the top 10... Continue reading...
Posted by Robin Goad at 04:00 PM
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In Categories Music | News and Media | Retail | Search | Shopping and Classifieds | TV
Earlier this year we highlighted the growth of newspaper websites in the UK. As the chart below illustrates, the market share of the UK Independent, which has traditionally lagged behind most of its rivals online, has more doubled over the... Continue reading...
Posted by Robin Goad at 02:52 PM
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In Categories News and Media | Search
The ‘virtual fashion game’ Miss Bimbo has picked up a lot of press - Google News UK was the second ranked site receiving up traffic from the search term ‘miss bimbo’ last week. The website allows users to create a... Continue reading...
Posted by Robin Goad at 11:37 AM
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In Categories Fashion | Mosaic lifestyle | News and Media | Search | Social networks | Women
UK Internet users are more interested in the United States presidential race than politics at home. Senator Barack Obama is the most searched for political figure in the UK, receiving three times as many searches on his name last week... Continue reading...
Posted by Robin Goad at 03:00 PM
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In Categories News and Media | Politics | Search
The horrific injury sustained by Arsenal’s Brazilian-born Croatian striker Eduardo da Silva has led to an outpouring of sympathy from football fans, and not just supporters of Arsenal or Croatia. Searches for ‘eduardo’ increased almost forty-fold last week, and ‘eduardo... Continue reading...
Posted by Robin Goad at 01:50 PM
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In Categories Demographics | Football | News and Media | Search | Social networks | Video
Estimates as to the number of Polish people in the UK range from half a million to over a million. Mass immigration from Central and Eastern Europe has led to a rush for the ‘Polish Pound’, with everyone from multinational... Continue reading...
Posted by Robin Goad at 07:45 AM
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In Categories Demographics | Financial Services | News and Media | Retail | Search | Shopping and Classifieds | Social networks | Travel
Following on from Bill’s and Heather’s posts, I wanted to share some UK data on the proposed Yahoo! and Microsoft deal. First up: webmail services, and as the chart below illustrates, Microsoft has a dominant market share with its Hotmail... Continue reading...
Posted by Robin Goad at 05:47 PM
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In Categories Email | Employment | Financial Services | Movies | Music | News and Media | Retail | Search | Shopping and Classifieds | Sport | Travel
UK Internet traffic to newspaper websites reached its highest level in over two years last week off the back of a number of big news stories. For the week ending 26 January 2008, 1.48% of all UK Internet visits went... Continue reading...
Posted by Robin Goad at 11:00 AM
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In Categories Movies | Music | News and Media | Politics | Search