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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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 [...]

Related Topics: Ask: Web Search | Search & Society: General | Search Marketing: Search Term Research | Stats: Search Behavior

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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Following the major engines themselves, Experian Hitwise announced the top search terms of 2011. The company looked at the top 1,000 search queries of 2011 and found that Facebook topped the list for the third year in a row. Overall Facebook had four of the top 10 search terms for 2011, the same as in 2010. However query volume for the collection of Facebook terms grew 33 percent vs. last year. Top search queries of 2010 and 2011 What's noteworthy is that all of the top 10 are navigational queries. Beyond the top 10, Hitwise said that "social networking-related terms dominated the [...]

Related Topics: Search & Society | Search & Society: General | Stats: Hitwise | Stats: Popularity | Top News