Top Search Trends, June 2009

As part of our monthly newsletter we are going to start looking at what the hot trends are online—essentially, what people are searching for and tweeting about. We'll be using a combination of Google Trends, Yahoo Buzz and Twitter Trends. While not a perfect science, we want to give you an idea of what is happening online and what is generating interest.

Michael Jackson
The top searched term for the month of June was Michael Jackson. News of his death crippled search engines and social networks alike. The only other time in history that the internet saw such a mass influx of people was on November 4, 2008 when people were tracking the election of President Barack Obama.

Political Unrest
With dissatisfaction over the elections in Iran, protesters not only took to the street, but used Twitter to voice their dissatisfaction, and to inform the rest of the world and organize protests. Twitter's relevance as a medium for communication was increased by the State Department's request that it not undergo a scheduled maintenance which would have brought the site down for 90 minutes, allowing Iranians to continue to voice their opinions uninterrupted.

Huge Percentage Increases
The largest swings in traffic were attributed to "Air France Flight 447," "David Carradine (actor)," and "Bing (Microsoft Search Engine)." Each of these topics saw immense increases in traffic as people looked for more information on the disappearance of Flight 447, the death of David Carradine and the launch of Microsoft's Bing search engine.