Over the past couple of days, numerous stats and figures have been published about how Super Bowl advertisers took advantage (or not) of social media this year. But commercials also drive people to search engines, which in turn (when things go right) can lead potential customers to advertiser web sites where rather than talk about a brand as they can on social media sites, they can watch the commercials again, cementing brand messaging, and take a closer look at the products being sold. (Which is presumably why a company would spend $3.5 million dollars on a thirty second spot in the first pla [...]

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Super Bowl 46 kicks off on February 5, 2012 at 6:30pm EST on NBC. Amazingly enough, I found this information by searching on Google and clicking on the second result: nfl.com. Amazing because every year, football fans flock to search engines searching for the start time, and until now, organizations like the NFL, the playing teams, and the broadcasting station didn't show up at all in search results because none of their sites answered the question. Seem crazy? 2009  Results: In 2009, start-time related searches were among the most popular the morning of the game, but neither the N [...]

Related Topics: Features: Analysis | Search & Society | Search Marketing: Search Term Research

The longest search queries are happening on Ask.com, where users average almost five words per search. That's according to research from Chitika. The ad network analyzed search referrals on "hundreds of millions" of impressions across sites in its network between January 9th and 12th. And the longest search referrals -- at an average of 4.81 words -- came from Ask.com. AOL users are at the other end of the spectrum; their user queries average barely above four words, by far the shortest of the five sites that Chitika studied. It makes sense that this would be the case, since Ask.com [...]

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US Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum made a surprise leap ahead to practically tie Mitt Romney in yesterday's Iowa caucus results. Now people are searching to find out more about him and discovering THAT result which makes comedy show hosts like Jon Stewart giggle. But rather than blame Google (or Bing), as Santorum has in the past, much of the fault remains with his own campaign. Searching For Santorum Here's how Google Trends currently looks: The arrow shows how searches for "rick santorum" are now that second most "hot searches" happening, searches that are occurring f [...]

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I've seen some weird Google results in my time, but this one is pretty strange. Search for "define an english person" or some related queries, and Google brings up the Wikipedia page about the C-word in response. As spotted by Search Engine Roundtable, people were asking in Google's help forums why various searches related to defining English people returned the Wikipedia page about the C-word, as shown below: The screenshot shows Google listing the Wikipedia page first in a search for define english person. It also lists that page first or in the first page of results for related sear [...]

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