Click

Online insights from Bill Tancer

Bill Tancer is the general manager of global research at Hitwise and a weekly columnist for Time Magazine.

For information on Bill's upcoming book "Click", visit the following booksellers: Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Borders, or BookSense.

September 2008
Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
  1 2 3 4 5 6
7 8 9 10 11 12 13
14 15 16 17 18 19 20
21 22 23 24 25 26 27
28 29 30        

« Previous | Main

Tropical Storms and the Katrina Effect

September 09, 2008 12:05 PM

If you were to roll time back to the days before Hurricane Katrina, it would be a truly rare occurrence to see any "tropical storm" search terms in the top 1,000 overall search terms. Since Katrina's tragic devastation, search term data indicates that our sensitivity to and our awareness of tropical storms has increased dramatically.

The chart below shows the volume of searches containing "tropical storm" over the last year.

Tropical_storm

In the four weeks ending Sept. 6, 2008, the top tropical storm searches were; Fay, Hanna  and Gustav. Search term data also indicates that searchers are becoming more sophisticated in the storm searches, with queries such as "Tropical Storm Fay tracking" and "Tropical Storm projected path" making the top search list.

September 9, 2008 | Permalink | User Comments (1)

User Comments

Feed You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the comment feed for this post.

Hello Bill, I just finished your "Click" book. There is some real gold in there! The passages about seasonal shifts in search patterns qualified by demographics were amazing. Great stuff.
Thank you for writing it!

Richard

Posted by: Richard | Sep 30, 2008 12:58:59 PM

Post a comment