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Hitwise Intelligence - Heather Hopkins - North America

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Swine Flu Fears Rising

April 28, 2009

As the number of swine flu cases continues to climb so does public interest in the outbreak. The search term "swine flu" ranked #133 among the more than 1.5 million unique search terms we captured last week in the US. More than 1 in every 8000 US Internet searches last week was for "swine flu". The following table shows the top 10 searches term variations for the word "flu" last week.

Looking at the table we see that Americans are looking for more information on the outbreak and specifically for symptoms to look out for. Searches for "swine flu" sent internet users to the Centers for Disease Control, and Prevention, Wikipedia and Google News.

The CDC website, which alone received more than one third of visits from searches for "swine flu", saw its share of US internet visits jump 63% last week. Visits to the site were higher than they've been in the past three years. Looking at the DMA of visitors to CDC.gov last week, we see that the largest share was from Internet users in New York, NY, making up 7.64% of visits.Comparing visits to four weeks ago, before the outbreak, we've seen a 13% increase in visits from those in New York, NY. New York was followed by LA, Chicago and Philadelphia in share of visits to CDC.gov.

We are likely to continue to see an increase in Internet visits to CDC.gov over the coming days. On Sunday, we saw an 83% single day incraese in visits to the site.

Posted by Heather Hopkins at 08:41 AM | (0) | (1)

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