Boyzone Gately's death dominates UK search engines

Wed 21 October 2009 16:37, Bas van den Beld

To get the real fame you first have to die. That is what used to be said about painters in the 17th century. They would get 'famous' only after they were gone. If you look at search engines, the same thing goes for the artists these days. After a death of a famous person, they tend to dominate the search engines.

We saw this happening with Michael Jackson several months ago and numbers from Hitwise now show the same is happening in the UK with the death of Boyzone singer Stephen Gately. And if you want a piece of the action, you mock the dead.

Looking at the numbers of Hitwise Stephen Gately's death is all over the UK search engines. "stephen gately boyzone" and "stephen gately dead" are the second and third fastest moving search terms last week, with four other direct related searches also in the top ten.

Remarkably enough the fastest moving search is that of someone commenting the death of Gately, "Jan Moir". She wrote in a column in the UK edition of the Irish Daily Mail that Gately's death "strikes another blow to the happy-ever-after myth of civil partnerships". She claimed the death was not natural. Her column apparently wasn't liked by many because she got no less than 22.000 complaints. And that made her the fastest growing search in the UK last week, even more than the man she wrote about.

It's always interesting to look at the search trends. That way you can see what people in a specific country are interested in. This is especially interesting for those working with affiliate sites. That is why Google Trends can be such a useful tool.

With Google Trends and Google Insights you can see what most people are searching for in a specific region. That way you can 'measure' what is hot and what is not. Most likely the 'hot topics' are news related topics. It shows here that being on top of the news might just help some...

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