Google released the Google Zeitgeist 2011 today. Google made several lists this year and even broke them down by country. You can play with the interactive lists at googlezeitgeist.com.

Those in the picture above are included in the “fastest rising searches” category, including Rebecca Black, Google+, Ryan Dunn, Casey Anthony, Battlefield 3, iPhone 5, Adele, 東京 電力, Steve Jobs and iPad 2.

Google summed up the year also in this video:

Here is a partial text based list:

Fastest-Rising Toys 1. Lego Alien Conquest 2. Unova Pokedex 3. Fluttershy

Fastest-Rising Costumes 1. Angry Birds 2. LMFAO 3. Flynn Rider

Fastest-Rising Recalls 1. Turkey 2. Bob stroller 3. Stihl

Most Popular Apparel Brands 1. Nike 2. Victoria Secret 3. Zappos

Most Popular Jewelry 1. engagement rings 2. Tiffanys 3. Pandora jewelry

Most Popular Gift Stores 1. Edible Arrangements 2. Oriental Trading 3. Spencers

Most Popular Home & Garden 1. Home Depot 2. Lowes 3. Ikea

Fastest-Rising Gadgets 1. Kindle Fire 2. iPhone 4S 3. Sidekick 4G

Most Popular Cell Phones 1. iPhone 2. HTC Evo 3. HTC Thunderbolt

Most Popular Video Games 1. Black Ops 2. Call of Duty 3. Halo Reach

Fastest-Rising Home Appliances 1. Dyson Slim 2. Foodsaver Vacuum Sealer 3. Kirby Vacuum

Most Popular Coupons 1. Target 2. Lowes 3. Hobby Lobby

For the past year’s Google Zeitgeist, see this page.

Related Stories

• 2011 Yahoo! In Review: Top US Searches In 30 Categories
• AOL In 2011: Charlie Sheen #Winning Over Other Celebrities
• Searching For Answers On Ask.com In 2011
• Bieber Tops Bing’s List Of Most Popular Searches In 2011

Google, Yahoo Didn’t Show Spike

Yesterday, I had some people ask me why Steve Jobs wasn’t showing on Google Trends. This is how things looked at 7:15pm PT yesterday, about 2 1/2 hours after the news that Steve Jobs had died broke:

As you can see, “steve jobs” wasn’t in the top trending searches. There was nothing related at all. Going to the full list:

You can see that some terms related to his death were trending, such as “pancreatic cancer” and “steve wozniak.”

The oddity of Steve Jobs not showing in trending terms was also the case at Yahoo. You can see the Yahoo home page below, as of around 8pm PT last night. None of the top ten “Trending Now” terms shown in the top right corner were about Jobs:

Delay To Fight Spam?

What was going on? With Yahoo, I think the trending terms are editorially picked. I’m checking on this. My guess was that Yahoo’s editors probably decided it would be in bad taste to put Jobs name in that list, even if actual search activity was reflecting that.

As I write this, Steve Jobs is sometimes on the list, sometimes not. It changes each time you reload the page, I’ve just noticed. Perhaps that was the case last night, that it was there but not when I loaded.

With Google, I’m still waiting for an answer. If I do get one, I’ll update. My own guess was that Google may have perhaps manually kept Steve Jobs out of the trending topics for perhaps a very good reason — to fend off spam about this name.

Any term that hits Google Trends can attract a ton of people tossing up garbage or even malware in hopes of ranking well for a word, especially in Google Blog Search. My thought was that Google perhaps was expressly sensitive to this issue, and how disturbing it might be to searchers, who sought information about Jobs.

Search Activity Since The News

Whatever the reason, it was odd. Consider this chart of search activity that Google did send me about an hour ago, in response to the question I asked about Google Trends last night:

You can see the huge spike that happened in the wake of the news. That’s precisely the type of activity you’d expect Google Trends to have reflected, but that wasn’t the case.

Today, this type of activity is reflected. The current top ten:

Steve Jobs leads the list, and there are many terms related to his death, as is also the case for the full list:

You can also see the volume of searches over time for searches in the close-up Google Trends page for his name, along with some of the related searches that are happening:

Again, I’ll update more about why Google Trends wasn’t showing this yesterday. Google said they’d check further on it for me.

Google Tributes To Jobs

Somewhat related, both Google cofounders Sergey Brin and Larry Page made nice statements about Jobs.

Page posted:

I am very, very sad to hear the news about Steve. He was a great man with incredible achievements and amazing brilliance. He always seemed to be able to say in very few words what you actually should have been thinking before you thought it. His focus on the user experience above all else has always been an inspiration to me. He was very kind to reach out to me as I became CEO of Google and spend time offering his advice and knowledge even though he was not at all well. My thoughts and Google’s are with his family and the whole Apple family.

Brin posted:

From the earliest days of Google, whenever Larry and I sought inspiration for vision and leadership, we needed to look no farther than Cupertino. Steve, your passion for excellence is felt by anyone who has ever touched an Apple product (including the macbook I am writing this on right now). And I have witnessed it in person the few times we have met.On behalf of all of us at Google and more broadly in technology, you will be missed very much. My condolences to family, friends, and colleagues at Apple.

Google also ran a nice, tasteful tribute to Jobs on the bottom of its home page yesterday. This morning, it was gone for me. However, I’ve noticed now that it appears to be back for me. I’m not sure if it was just some caching issue on my part, or if it really did go away and come back. Regardless, it’s nice to see:

Postscript: Hitwise, which tracks search term popularity through a variety of sources, has tweeted that searches for “steve jobs” made it the ninth most popular search in the US, yesterday. Previously, searches for his name ranked 47,974th, on Oct 4.

Also, see our related post, Tweets About Steve Jobs Spike But Don’t Break Twitter Record.

Search Globe plots different colored bars protruding from the globe. Each color represents a different language, and you’d see a nice diverse set of colors (i.e. languages) over places like Europe and parts of Asia.

Here is a video of how it works:

Click here to view the embedded video.

The Google Data Arts Team put this together to help Internet accessibility throughout the world by geographic area and language. They also wanted to their WebGL talents and how it renders on Google’s browser, Chrome.

If you have interesting data sets, you can plot them using this globe feature by utilizing the The WebGL Globe.

Trend Micro reported earlier this morning that malware sites had started targeting search terms shortly after the quake hit. As shown in the image above, Trend Micro found several sites offering fake anti-virus software in the search results for the term, “most recent earthquake in Japan.” Thanks to Trend Micro’s post and related coverage, the first page of Google’s results for that phrase now includes several articles about the malware. (Bing’s results, at the moment, are a little more suspect than Google’s, though I haven’t clicked through to visit any pages from either search engine.)

This is a common happening after major news events, with similar reports after the recent earthquakes in Haiti and Chile. Spammers and malware sites make a habit of targeting hot search topics. Last spring, we reported on one study that claimed some “hot” Google searches returned 90% malicious links.

But despite all that, Google is asking if search trends can predict the Oscar winners, and it’s created a mini-site called Oscar Search Trends to let us see who’s winning the search activity race.

As of this moment, Black Swan would be the favorite for Best Picture — if Google search activity is any measure of things to come. The site shows trends for all of the major Oscar categories and a lot of minor ones, too – about two dozen in all. (There’s also a countdown to the awards ceremony, but Google’s clock is off by three hours; it starts at 8:00 pm ET on February 27th, not 8:00 pm PT.)

Based on film awards that have already been announced, the New York Times says that The King’s Speech is the favorite for Best Picture. But in the end, prior awards, search activity and social media may tell us nothing about who’ll win the Oscars this year. It may be that a German cross-eyed opossum has as good a chance as anyone … including Google.

Why should advertisers care about showing up in search results? More and more, we’re using the internet and watching TV at the same time, and we’ve not just on Facebook. Even as our use of social media increases, so does our use of search. In the United States alone, we did 18.2 billion searches in December 2010, up 3% from the previous month and up from 14.7 billion in December 2009. And if you read my analysis of searcher behavior during the 2009 and 2010 Super Bowls, then you know that TV commercials cause us to search. Whether we want more information about a product or just want to watch the ad again, many of us turn to the search box after we’ve seen a commercial. Take a look, for instance, at the searcher behavior when the Chrysler 200 commercial aired:

Advertisers looking to engage with audiences past the initial commercial should make sure they’re visible in search results and provide content on their web sites that make searchers want to stick around.

Some advertisers do buy paid search ads for the taglines in their commercials, but historically, many of them have not been visible in the unpaid, or organic results. And that could mean a lot of wasted opportunity. Hitwise data that came out just a few days ago, for instance, showed that searches for Super Bowl recipes were up 239% last week over the previous week and that 76% of the clicks were to organic results.

And we know that engaging viewers of commercials on your web site pays off by, as much as I hate to admit it, watching Go Daddy. Every year, they show racy ads during the Super Bowl that entice viewers back to their web site. Audiences flock there for the bonus footage (and promise of “unrated content”) and, as crazy as it sounds, register domains.

Advertisers have a captive audience during the game, searching for commercials. How many of those brands and commercials show up in search results? And how many really take advantage of that interest? Every year, I keep track of the commercials and take note of which cause search spikes (check back over the next few days for a report on that) and which brands show up in search results. How did things go this year?

Successes:

• 100% of brands had at least some search visibility (other than movies). This is significantly better than in past years.
• When URLs were included in commercials, those URLs were almost always visible in search. This is starkly different from previous years, when use of vanity URLs and promotional microsites often kept advertised URLs from showing up at all.

Failures

• Many brands didn’t include mention the Super Bowl ads at all on their home pages, which likely prevented engagement with key audiences searching for them.
• Several brands required actions such as registration or Facebook “like” to see ads or to interact with brand.

New This Year

• Advertising Facebook URLs rather than owned domains – on the one hand, these advertisers gave all of their Super Bowl traffic to Facebook and lost some control. They likely also excluded some of their potential audience as fewer than half of Americans are on Facebook. However, Facebook does provide an easy platform for content creation that might have been prohibitive in the advertisers’ internal environments.
• Advertising Twitter hashtags - I didn’t see any Twitter accounts shown in commercials (although I did see Twitter icons), but several movie ads included hashtags, no doubt intended to encourage conversation about the movie.

Search Scorecard

Below is a summary of how visible the Super Bowl advertisers were to searchers. I noted the key elements highlighted in the commercial (brand, product name, tagline, URL), whether those elements showed up in organic or paid search, and if the brand site engaged visitors who came to the site after viewing the commercials. The first chart shows the results by industry and the second set of charts shows details for each brand (you’ll have to click the image and then click again to expand it so you can read the data). The red indicates when things failed; the orange indicates when I gave the brand a point, but they really just barely made it. I show a couple of examples of that below the scoring. Some scoring isn’t black and white. I generally gave the brand the point if they did some paid search, for instance, even if they didn’t have paid ads for both brand and product searches. And every searcher can see different results, so my number one ranking may not be the same as your number one ranking. Note also that I used Google in scoring since it has dominant market share. This scorecard is based on a typical searcher’s experience. So, if an organization did paid search but I didn’t see any paid search ads in the searches I did, then my scorecard doesn’t provide that organization with a point.

Internet Brands

You’d expect internet brands to score well in all areas, and for the most part, they did. Surprisingly, Go Daddy, which tends to do well with search visibility, on-site engagement, and visibility, faltered a bit this year, particularly with their new godaddy.co promotion. Saleforce’s chatter.com also suffered from some of the search issues acquiring a new domain can bring (see a future article for more on this), and most surprisingly, not all brands had clear online engagement paths. Some didn’t provide a way to watch the ads at all, and others required registration in order to view the ads. Businesses should always weigh the benefits of registration against the high abandonment rates such obstacles are likely to cause.

Cars

The car brands were out in force, and for the most part, they faired well in search. Only two failed to include URLs in their ads (Audi opted for the #progressis hashtag instead, which apparently is tied to a promotion they are running for a free car, but the commercial didn’t mention this). Their search visibility was significantly better than in past years. Their biggest weakness was compelling engagement with visitors on site. Volkswagen, for instance, has been running a successful social media campaign on Facebook and YouTube leading up to the Super Bowl, but you’d never know it from the vw.com home page.

Technology

Not many technology brands advertised during the Super Bowl and those that did had mixed results in search. None of the four I looked at were running paid search campaigns and only Best Buy (which one could argue is a consumer brand, rather than a technology brand) had a Super Bowl tie in on their home page. Motorola advertised facebook.com/motorola rather than their own domain and the Sony Ericsson Xperia Play ad simply said “join us on Facebook.” Join who? The Sony Ericsson page? The Xperia page? Is there a specific Xperia Play page? Google isn’t much help, ranking an event page (of the launch?), a UK page with no activity, and a forum post. Searching Facebook itself for the right page requires me to be logged in (there goes over half the audience who either don’t have accounts or can’t be bothered to log in) and once I do, I don’t get any of the results I found from Google, but instead two other results that don’t appear to be owned by Sony Ericsson. Searching for just “Sony Ericsson” does seem to get me to the right place. But let’s be honest. I’ve only gotten that far because I’m writing an article about it.

Consumer Goods

These brands don’t like letting their audiences knew that they even have web sites. Fortunately for them, those web sites mostly show up in searches for their brand names anyway.

Movies

Ah, the motion picture industry. You sure want us to talk up your movies on Twitter. But it doesn’t always cross you mind we might want to search for more information about them.

Examples of Success and Missteps

Below are just a few examples to help make sense of the charts.

Hyundai: Good Visibility and Engagement

Hyundai has tried to tie together Super Bowl advertising and online engagement before. In 2009, they prominently featured edityourown.com but despite significant search interest, didn’t show up in search results at all. In 2010, it seemed seemed to have given up on the online world. This year, they got things mostly right. They advertised their main domain, hyundai.com in their ad, and ranked well for their brand and other related searches. Their home page featured several engaging elements that tied back to the Super Bowl ads.

Interestingly, one of the ads mentioned a different site, compactconspiracy.com, and unlike the edityourown.com microsite of 2009, this site ranks number one for searches for [compact conspiracy]. That site links to several others (unbackmasked.com, boredomvirus.com, equinby.com). Possibly someone is bored at the ad agency and has gone a little crazy with the underground viral sites.

godaddy.co: Issues With the Search Results Display

One of Go Daddy’s ads revealed the new godaddy.co girl (er, Joan Rivers) and urged everyone to remake themselves at godaddy.co. But if you search for godaddy.co, you’re presented with some unfriendly results. Network Solutions has bought a paid search ad for the query though, and is happy to both give you a special price on your .co domain and provide a GoGranny ad as an alternative to the Go Daddy girls.

What’s the problem with the godaddy.co and godaddy.com display? Mostly technical problems that are preventing search engines from fully crawling the content (and as a web site hosting company, they should know better!). Brian Ussery has a bit more on that.

Pepsi Max: What if I Don’t Want To Click the “Like” Button?

I see this trend a lot lately. Advertisers get caught up in metrics and forget why they set those metrics up in the first place. Everyone wants people to “like” their pages on Facebook. This shows that their audience is engaging with the brand in a positive way. You know what else shows that your audience is engaging with your brand in a positive way? Views of your Super Bowl commercials! In fact, the more consumers watch your ads, the more likely they are to buy your products (and maybe even click that like button). Requiring consumers to click the button before you’ll let them watch the ad? A lot of them are going to bail.

Groupon went one step farther, requiring you to register for the site before you could view the ads.

How about I watch your ad and then decide whether or not I want to sign up for your service?

An Integrated Strategy Is Key

Am I saying that brands should abandon Facebook and focus solely on search? That the film industry should stop encouraging discussion on Twitter? Of course not. But I do think that marketing needs to continue to evolve towards a more integrated strategy. Marketing should be about “and” rather than “or”. When I looked for the Coca Cola ad, for instance I landed on the coca-cola.com home page, saw no mention of the Super Bowl, and then just happened to notice an embedded Twitter feed that was scrolling tweets by Coke with links to their commercials.

Don’t make your audiences search every online nook and cranny for you. If your customers are looking for you, let yourself be found.

Related Posts:

• What Time Does the 2011 Super Bowl Start? A (Continuing) Lesson in Search Visibility
• Scoring the Super Bowl 2010 Commercials: How’s the Search Visibility?
• Scoring the (2009) Super Bowl Ads & Search: Do Broadcast Marketers Get Online Acquisition
• Can Searchers Find the (2009) Super Bowl

Before the Super Bowl in both 2009 and 2010, I checked out the search engine results for the Super Bowl start time. In 2009, the results were abysmal. No one was taking advantage of the clear searcher interest. One could argue that the search engines themselves did a poor job at surfacing relevant results but that argument assumes relevant results existed. The official sites were virtually uncrawlable. In 2010, the search engines took matters into their own hands, crafting “onebox” style results that appeared above the regular web search results. But the engines faltered a bit with search quality, as those web results were spammy and sad.

So how are things this year? Did the NFL and Fox take my free advice and turn it into an avalanche of web traffic? Did Google and Bing take my article as a spam report and clean things up? Let’s find out!

Seasonal Search Trends

Nearly every business can take advantage of seasonal interest. It’s not always as obvious as the Super Bowl start time, but Google Insights makes things practically that easy.

You can even see the related searches, so if you create content to help the searcher accomplish the task at hand, you incorporate all of the relevant searcher language.

“Hot” Trends

As with previous years, we see that lots of people want to know what time the Super Bowl starts:

Here’s the thing about search trends and seasonal searches. A lot of discussion lately has focused on “content farms” that write and publish content based on what people search for most. For the most part, these sites don’t provide a lot of value, as they’re not written by someone who’s an expert or passionate about a topic. They’re simply a bunch of words that match a popular topic. Google is working on algorithms to keep these types of pages from ranking well in search results. Danny Sullivan recently noted that if news publications such as the New York Times started running their businesses this way, they’d stop covering what’s happening and important in the world and instead just cater to the most popular topics.

To be clear, that’s not what I’m advocating. Instead, I’m saying that organizations such as the NFL and Fox could use search data to find out what their audiences need and make sure they are meeting those needs. In this case, the NFL audience is turning to the search box to find out what time the game starts. If the NFL would provide this information and make sure it’s visible in search, people would be happy and they’d tune into the game on time. Everyone wins.

Can Google Tell Us When the Game Starts?

I admit, I’m a little sad. Some of the same spammy sites from last year are still ranking. Xomba, which I called out in 2010 and which continues to rank well, is an infuriating collage of spamarrific delight, mixing every possible jarring combination of dates and numbers and words and broken HTML code into a spamtastic symphony that would make angels cry.

But do you know what else makes me sad? The Huffington Post. In my opinion, they lose all credibility as a serious news organization with articles like this one:

Seriously, Arianna? That’s just embarrassing.

Or maybe not. The page ranks highly on Google in both news and web results for this query.

And the NFL and Fox? Still nowhere to be found. (Note that the nfl.com result that you see is not a ranked result to their Super Bowl content; it’s a sports feed that Google has placed there manually in order to ensure searchers have a good experience and get the information that they need.)

I won’t rehash why that is. You can just read my article from last year and replace 2010 with 2011 and CBS with Fox. Well, except that Fox doesn’t even have the game listed on their home page (unless you watch the home page intently for more than 10 seconds and wait for the Flash images to rotate through). No, seriously. If not for web spam, I might not believe Fox was the right station.

As it was last year, both sites have all kinds of pre-game content that they likely would like to get in front of this very targeted and interested audience and lots of display ads they’d likely make lots of money with had they more page views.

Can Bing Tell Us When The Game Starts?

Those results were from Google. Does Bing do any better?

If it rains on game day, it’s because the angels have gone from delicate angel-like tears to full sobbing. Bing has nearly identical results to Google (same Xomba page; same super-bowl-history.us page that is a near duplicate of the Xomba page, the seriously-reporting-the-news-for-the-enrichment-of-all-of-our-lives Huffington Post), but also ranks a 2009 Associated Content page about the 2009 Super Bowl that is overflowing with knowledge:

“But a whole bunch of people don’t even know when the Super Bowl starts. As of noon EST today, here are some of the most frequent Google searches, based on the Google Trends site:

– Number One, “what time does the super bowl start 2009.”

– Number Five, “superbowl kick off time 2009″

– Number Six, “superbowl kickoff”

Well, at least these Google searchers know what year this is.

Believe it or not, there actually is one of those e-how web pages devoted to this dilemma. The title is, “How to find out the 2009 superbowl kickoff time.” In Step Two, this e-how web page tells you how to find out the 2009 Super Bowl kickoff time. It reveals that the Super Bowl kickoff in Tampa is scheduled to occur at precisely 6:18 p.m. EST.”

Pure, unfiltered wisdom.

Related Posts:

• Can Searchers Find the Super Bowl (2009)
• Searching for the Super Bowl Start Time: How Are the Engines, the NFL, and CBS Doing? (2010)
• Super Bowl 2010 Winners: Google, Yahoo & Bing Are Ready

Here is a look at the Top Global Events including World Cup, Olympics, and the Haiti Earthquake:

Here is the list:

Fastest Rising
1. chatroulette
2. ipad
3. justin bieber
4. nicki minaj
5. friv
6. myxer
7. katy perry
8. twitter
9. gamezer
10. facebook

Fastest Falling
1. swine flu
2. wamu
3. new moon
4. mininova
5. susan boyle
6. slumdog millionaire
7. circuit city
8. myspace layouts
9. michael jackson
10. national city bank

Fastest Rising in Entertainment
1. justin bieber
2. shakira
3. eminem
4. netflix
5. youtube videos
6. lady gaga
7. kesha
8. nicki minaj
9. grooveshark
10. transformers 3

Fastest Rising in Sports
1. mundial 2010
2. olympics
3. espn3
4. fifa 11
5. randy moss
6. miami heat
7. mourinho
8. wayne rooney
9. cricket live score
10. david villa

Fastest Rising in Consumer Electronics
1. ipad
2. iphone 4
3. nokia 5530
4. htc evo 4g
5. nokia n900
6. blackberry apps
7. duracell mygrid
8. 트위터
9. otterbox
10. pdanet

Fastest Rising in Food & Drink
1. masterchef
2. 食べログ
3. cupcakes
4. jimmy johns
5. как жрать суши
6. dominos pizza menu
7. tudo gostoso receitas
8. guacamole recipe
9. applebees menu
10. rachel ray

Fastest Rising Maps Searches
1. anhembi parque
2. wm gucken
3. world cup
4. bundeskanzleramt
5. rio branco
6. mt everest
7. kew gardens
8. tour eiffel
9. oxford street
10. nürburgring

Fastest Rising People
1. justin bieber
2. katy perry
3. selena gomez
4. kim kardashian
5. eminem
6. lady gaga
7. miley cyrus
8. taylor lautner
9. megan fox
10. robert pattinson

In the News
1. haiti
2. besiktas
3. chile
4. earthquake
5. lady gaga
6. iphone 4
7. jörg kachelmann
8. menowin fröhlich
9. mobile technology
10. oil spill

Fastest Rising Translations
1. vancouver 2010
2. apprendimento automatico
3. ресторан нью-йорк
4. машинное обучение
5. beijing apartments
6. comercio electrónico
7. st. petersburg restaurants
8. منتزه يلوستون الوطني
9. energia solare
10. dubai tours

Fastest Rising Health Queries
1. hcg diet
2. dr oz
3. aspergers
4. mcdonalds nutrition
5. vitamin d deficiency
6. appendicitis symptoms
7. cholera
8. nfp
9. vacina h1n1
10. whooping cough

Fastest Rising Humanitarian Aid
1. donate to haiti
2. donate to pakistan
3. text to donate
4. doctors without borders
5. download to donate
6. red cross canada
7. blood donation restrictions
8. donate blood australia
9. donate now button
10. csl plasma

Here is a nice video Google put together summarizing some of the keywords and events in 2010:

I do love the instant inference in the video.

For more details see the Google blog and the Google 2010 Zeitgeist.

Using data from Google Trends, Google Insights for Search and some additional tools, the Google Beat will give you a snapshot of some of the topics that prompted people to turn to the web over the past week.

A weekly video is small potatoes to what Yahoo’s been doing for a long time now. Its Yahoo Buzz Blog posts several articles per day looking at daily hot search topics with explanations why the terms are popular. It’s a great read if you’re interested in searcher behavior and real-time/hot search topics.

Postscript: MediaWeek also writes about Yahoo’s Who Knew? web video series, a daily feature that focuses on hot news topics that Yahoo users are searching for. It’s become Yahoo’s most successful original series with an average of more than 10 million streams per month.

Barracuda Labs says it studied the four search engines for about two months and reviewed more than 25,000 trending topics and almost 5.5 million search results. The results aren’t good for Google:

Overall, Google takes the crown for malware distribution – turning up more than twice the amount of malware as Bing, Twitter and Yahoo! combined when searches on popular trending topics were performed. Google presents at 69 per cent; Yahoo! at 18 per cent; Bing at 12 per cent; and Twitter at one per cent.

The study also cites an increase in rogue accounts on Twitter this year. The “Twitter Crime Rate” — the percentage of accounts created each month that Twitter later suspends — was 1.67% for the first half of 2010, with a high of 2.38% in June.

This is a topic we’ve written about before, especially where Google is concerned. In April, one report suggested that some “hot topic” searches on Google returned 90% malicious links. On a more general level, I wrote last year about a McAfee study that examined the web’s riskiest search terms.

Postscript, August 4: A Google spokesperson has sent us this unsolicited statement in reply to the study cited above:

Google has been an industry leader in anti-malware research and technology. We actively work to detect and flag sites that serve malware with warning labels in our search results, reacting to the latest trends and monitoring popular search terms. Similar techniques have since been adopted by other major search engines, but these protections do not appear to have been taken into account by this study.