Two historical events happened over the past week – the British royal wedding, and the United States’ killing of terrorist leader Osama bin Laden. Looking at search trends, it’s very interesting to see how extraordinarily important world news stands up against celebrity and hyper-publicized buildup.
The United States has no connection to the British royal family, and American politicians have been promising to hunt down bin Laden for years, so you would expect people to be more interested in the second. Not the case. Looking at the peak search share of Royal Wedding-related searches and bin Laden-related searches, we see that in the US, the wedding pulled nearly 4x the search share. At its peak hour, 11.2% of all US searches in our sample were royal wedding related. In comparison, bin Laden searches peaked at just under 3%.
The power of celebrity is either impressive or alarming, depending on how you look at it. Arguably the biggest hard news story in years is dwarfed in web search popularity by two famous people getting married. Part of the reason can be chalked up to the timeliness – a news story like bin Laden is a quick-hit story with no forewarning. The royal wedding has been planned for months, with media hype reaching a boiling point.
Which is where services like Twitter come in. For instant, breaking, surprising news, Twitter shines where search falls short. The death of Osama bin Laden sparked a Twitter record for the most sustained Tweets.
It becomes obvious that search and social inhabit different worlds entirely. Social media is leading the way in real-time information and breaking news, while search’s dominance remains in more static, long-term, planned events that are at the top of individual searchers’ minds.
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