News Search vs. Web Search

Search Engine Watch takes a look at Google’s list of top searches in 2006, as well as Yahoo’s.

One key finding is that news searches and general web searches differed greatly. Two possible reasons:

  • Demographics and/or psychographics.
  • Situational intent.

However, they do reach a valuable conclusion for journalists and media companies:

“If you are looking for news search terms, you might get better results using Google Trends, Google Suggest for Google News, the Yahoo News “also try” feature, or Keyword Discovery’s news keywords database. But, don’t be surprised if their news search term suggestions often seem surprising. The most popular news search terms are often different from the most popular web search terms. That’s a fact you can take to the bank – even if we can’t explain why this is true just yet.”

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