Britney Spears’ forgot-to-do-my-laundry debacle (you know what I mean, don’t make me say it) couldn’t have been better for her career (and the multitudes of semi-pedophilic or naturally curious masses for that matter) if it had been contrived by her own publicist. Spears is not just at the top of the celebrity search charts, she’s more popular than Yahoo.
Hitwise weighs in to tell us that searches for keyword [britney spears] jumped 930 percent last week. Look closely, there’s no decimal where there should be. In fact, out of the 1.3 million queries Hitwise snatched last week, Britney ranked number five.
The rest of the story is a sad one, not because of the relative lack of voyeurism or the abundance of skirt-chasing hoards, but because the other top search terms are painful reminders of just how unsophisticated most searchers are.
Or maybe all of Federline’s kids got online at the same time, skewing the results.
The Top Ten Search Terms Driving Traffic to All Categories:
1. myspace
2. myspace.com
3. ebay
4. www.myspace.com
5. britney spears
6. yahoo
7. mapquest
8. walmart
9. myspace layouts
10. craigslist
Boy, it sure is a good thing we developed the greatest communication/informational/educational system in the history of humanity. Seems like the people sure are getting use of it.
But at least those following search trends get something out of this (besides gratuitous, um, you know). LeeAnn Prescott seems less discouraged by it:
Statistics are fun when we talk about celebrity searches, but what does this mean for online businesses? News sites are increasingly bidding on and optimizing for leading news and celebrity terms in order to attract users.
Last week news sites received much of the traffic from searches for just Britney’s name…but blogs and smaller websites received more of the traffic from the more specific search terms, and experienced significant increases in traffic.
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