The London Olympics were the #7 most popular search on Yahoo! overall in 2012, Even Mckayla Maroney has to be impressed with that. Searchers were flipping and flying as high as Gabby Douglas for any official games coverage on Yahoo in 2012. Top Searches for 2012 Olympians On Yahoo! maria sharapova lolo jones serena williams hope solo mckayla maroney caroline wozniacki leryn franco michael phelps misty may‐treanor aly raisman Standout Sports Searches On Yahoo! In 2012: olympics opening ceremony kim mulkey makes NCAA history australian open ekaterina mak [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Consumer | Search & Society: General | Yahoo

For 2012, Kim Kardashian might have been the overall top searched for celebrity, but there were many people to watch and track through various forms of media and paparazzi. Top Searched Celebrity Couples Who Broke Up In 2012 Justin Bieber and Selena Gomez Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson Katie Holmes and Tom Cruise Jennifer Lopez and Marc Anthony Scarlett Johansson and Nate Naylor Heidi Klum and Seal Johnny Depp and Vanessa Paradis Chad Johnson and Evelyn Lozada John Cena and Elizabeth Huberdeau Vera Wang and Arthur Becker Top Searched Reality TV Stars On Yaho [...]

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Last year, Yahoo! celebrated ten years of sharing its annual Year In Review feature, marking the occasion by releasing 30 categories of the most popular searches on Yahoo! in 2011, one of the biggest lists up to that point in time. For 2012, Yahoo! one-upped themselves by providing us with the top 10 most popular searches in over 50 categories, giving us a mega list of the most common queries and questions asked by Yahoo! searchers over the last year. Vera Chan,Yahoo!  senior editor and Web trend analyst, has possibly the 2nd best job at Yahoo! next to Marissa Mayer, as she has been in [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Consumer | Features: General | Search & Society | Search & Society: General | Top News | Yahoo | Yahoo: Search

Ask.com's 100 million users remain almost as loyal as Twihards, prompting us to ask if searchers are on Team Jeeves or Team Diller when putting in their queries. For the 2012 installment of the series in hot searches, Ask added a new twist to the searcher saga, layering in a thicker plot and seeking a more satisfying end to the year by putting context around searcher motivations and perceptions about the most popular headlines. For the first time ever, the top asked questions are accompanied by select insights from an online survey, 2012: What’s on America’s Mind?, conducted within [...]

Related Topics: Ask | Ask: General | Ask: Web Search | Channel: Search | Search & Society: General | Top News

Oh baby, baby, baby oh... Sorry Biebs, you better believe you just got Kanye'd off the top searched celeb spot by Kim Kardashian. Ouch. But if you were her boyfriend... oh never mind. Let's get on to the good stuff that Bing announced earlier this evening, the big list of 2012 Bing Trends. Bing's biggest list to date includes nineteen categories, nearly doubling their hottest search topics in 2011, which was already a marked improvement over just two main celebrity search categories in 2010 and in 2009, which was Bing's very first list of year-end top searches. This year, the Bing sea [...]

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It's almost unanimous: 94 percent of U.S. teachers say their students equate "research" with using Google or other search engines -- more so than Wikipedia and other online encyclopedias. But teachers are less sure that their students are effective searchers, and they're more skeptical than most adults about the accuracy and trustworthiness of information that's found via search engines. The data comes from a new study by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project in conjunction with the College Board and the National Writing Project. Nearly 2,500 middle and high scho [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Strategy | Features: Analysis | Google: Web Search | Search & Society: General | Stats: Search Behavior | Top News

Trying to keep up with Hurricane Sandy? Below are a variety of resources which may help. Storm Tracking Google Super Storm Sandy Map Google Super Storm Sandy Maps: NYC Close-up ESRI's Hurricane Information Map Weather.com Hurricane Tracker Local TV Live Stream Boston: CBS NYC: NBC Philadelphia: CBS Washington DC: Fox Washington DC: NBC Radio A brief post with details about how to listen live to audio streams of first responders from throughout the affected region Listen to live audio streams from all-news stations in Boston, DC, Philadelphia, and New York C [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Consumer | Features: Analysis | Search & Society: General | Search Engines: Disasters | Search Headlines | Top News

I don't know what images were showing up for a "binders full of women" search on Google Images before last night's US presidential debate. But today, they're dominated by a meme started from a comment last night by Republican candidate Mitt Romney. Romney was commenting that he sought to increase the number of women in his cabinet as governor of Massachusetts by asking for more women candidates. As a result, he was delivered "binders full of women" to review. While some are now questioning the story, others are taking part in a new meme, making pictures poking fun at the idea of "binder [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Features: Analysis | Google: Images | Link Building: Link Bombs | Search & Society: General | Top News

There's a kind of Pavlovian response that happens with major national events in the U.S. (and probably elsewhere): internet users taking to the web to comment on and/or learn more about what they're experiencing. As expected, conversation spiked on social networking sites during the Vice Presidential debate last night. Twitter says there were 3.5 million tweets just during the debate itself, and another half-million before and after. (Update: For more on the social aspect of last night's debate, see my Marketing Land article: Red State, Blue State: The Social Network VP Debate Divide Shown [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Strategy | Features: Analysis | Search & Society: General | Stats: Search Behavior

Vice President Joe Biden and vice-presidential hopeful Paul Ryan are a little more than an hour away from their first and only debate of this election year, and search activity around the debate is heating up -- largely surrounding Ryan, the Republican nominee. We'll begin with this tweet from Yahoo Search, which reports that there's about seven percent more search interest in tonight's debate over the past week than there was in the week prior to last week's Presidential debate. JUST IN: Searches for the VP debate are 7% higher than the 7-day period leading up to the presidential debat [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Strategy | Search & Society: General | Stats: Search Behavior

Hey Emma Watson fans: Be really careful about clicking on those search results. McAfee, the security technology company, says Watson is 2012's most dangerous celebrity to search for -- replacing Heidi Klum, who held that title last year. According to McAfee's Most Dangerous Celebrities study, searches related to Watson have a 12.6 percent chance of leading to a malicious website that offers spyware, adware, viruses and the like. When it comes to dangerous search terms, the landscape is decidedly female. The only guy to make McAfee's top 20? That would be Jimmy Kimmel, who ranks number [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Strategy | Features: Analysis | Search & Society: General | Stats: General | Stats: Search Behavior

The dust has settled on both the Republican and Democratic national conventions and, while we don't know who'll ultimately get the most votes, it's clear that Democrats won the day where search activity is concerned. Both Google and Yahoo have analyzed their users' searches during the two conventions, and both show that search activity spiked significantly more during last week's Democratic National Convention (DNC). Google Search Activity & Political Conventions On its Google Plus page late Friday, Google's elections team shared a chart showing that three of the top four most-searche [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Strategy | Features: Analysis | Search & Society: General | Stats: Search Behavior

A Pew Research study that was released this week showed that Democrats are more likely to mix social media and political activity. They might be more likely to mix politics and search, too, at least judging from data comparing search activity from Michelle Obama and Ann Romney that Google has shared today. Michelle Versus Ann According to the Google Politics and Elections team, search interest Tuesday night in Michelle Obama during the first night of the Democratic National Convention (DNC) surpassed search interest in Ann Romney one week earlier during the first night of the Republican Nati [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Consumer | Search & Society | Search & Society: General | Stats: Search Behavior | Top News

The UK's Conservative Party has a new co-chair, The Right Honourable Grant Shapps, Member of Parliament for Welwyn Hatfield. Honorable except with Google, which considers the business he apparently founded to be pushing a tool designed to spam its search engine and fill its listings with rubbish. According to The Guardian, Shapps founded HowToCorp in 2005, a site that, among other products, pitches the TrafficPaymaster software. The software apparently "scrapes" or copies content from all over the web, from RSS feeds to even sets of search results, to automatically generate pages that proba [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Features: Analysis | Google: Web Search | Search & Society: General | SEO: Spamming | Top News

The interwebs are all a flutter over how a critic of NBC's Olympic coverage had his Twitter account suspended after tweeting the email address of the executive in charge of that coverage. It was private, said Twitter. Public to anyone with Google, said journalist Guy Adams, whose account was suspended. Actually, from what I can tell, it really wasn't public to anyone with Google. A Tweet Too Far Adams is a journalist who works for The Independent. He's tweeted loudly and proudly against NBC's coverage of the Olympics, as Deadspin details. But when he encouraged people to email Gary Zenkel, [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Consumer | Features: Analysis | Legal: Privacy | Search & Society | Top News | Twitter

It was right about this time last year when we gave Google the winner's trophy for a series of gags that put all others to shame. We could do the same again right now, because Google has tried to top itself with another round of April Fool's Day jokes that pretty well span the globe of Google's international properties. Below is a recap of Google's (and a few others) pranks, and we'll do our best to update this as the day goes along. Google Racing: Self-Driving Cars Hit NASCAR The main joke at the moment is Google's "announcement" of a partnership with NASCAR called Google Racing, which b [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Consumer | Google: AdWords | Google: Analytics | Google: Chrome | Google: General | Google: Gmail | Google: Maps & Local | Google: Mobile | Google: Other | Google: Parodies | Google: Street View | Search & Society: April Fool's | Top News | Yahoo: Flickr

As we covered last week, Google's search results for a search on "santorum" have gotten a lot cleaner recently. The change was featured on The Rachel Maddow Show last night, and Search Engine Land's coverage got a big shout-out. The clip is below, as well as an update on all things Santorum and Google. Santorum himself is finally number one, and that SafeSearch change Google made turns out not to be so safe. Maddow Covers The Santorum Shuffle "Spreading Santorum" Drops At Google is our story from last week and provides all the background about how the "Speading Santorum" site -- created as [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Consumer | Search & Society: Santorum Google Problem | Top News

As Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum loses two primary races to rival Mitt Romney, perhaps he can console himself with, ironically, another loss. Spreading Santorum, the page defining "santorum" as a by-product of anal sex, has finally dropped from the top results on Google. The related anti-Santorum blog, however, remains. And a page from Urban Dictionary keeps the definition alive, more explicit than before. Santorum: The Definition Page The page at SpreadingSantorum.com, created by columnist Dan Savage as a protest against Santorum's views about homosexuality, has maintain [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Consumer | Features: Analysis | Link Building: Link Bombs | Search & Society: General | Search & Society: Santorum Google Problem | Top News

Both Google and Yahoo used search data to create their own Oscar ballots. Turns out, their predictions were terribly wrong. At best, Google may have correctly predicted Meryl Streep winning, depending on how you read things. But overall, neither of them really got the winners right. Google's predictions are here; Yahoo's here. Let's see how they did! Best Picture Google: Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (or The Artist, Midnight In Paris) Yahoo: War Horse Winner: The Artist What went wrong here? With Google, it's actually hard to know what it was predicting. It narrowed thi [...]

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Last week at the Tools of Change conference, Clay Johnson, author of the new book The Information Diet gave a keynote talk titled "Is SEO Killing America". Sigh.  If you've been involved in search for any length of time, your first reaction may be, this again? Haven't we done this before? Once or twice? Clay's a friend of mine and I've read his book (it's quite good, by the way), so I knew both that he doesn't really think that SEO is killing America and that he's unaware just how much we're all over this particular linkbait-y title. And indeed his talk was not about how SEO is kill [...]

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