They aren't the top Internet search terms overall, but comScore Inc., which analyzes online marketing behavior for companies, notes that the increase of searches related to the economic downturn is significant.
When comScore looked at the searches for "unemployment" on the major search engines, the company found that in December 2008 the term "unemployment" was searched 206 percent more than it had been in December 2007. This last December, as we were marking the holiday season, "unemployment" was searched 8.2 million times.
And if that isn't depressing, the term "unemployment benefits" saw a year-over-year increase of 247 percent when it was searched 748,000 times.
The 2.6 million times "bankruptcy" was used as a search term was up 156 percent when compared from December 2008 to December 2007, and "foreclosure" was searched 1.3 million times, up 67 percent over December 2007.
"Online behavior has come to reflect the interests or concerns of Americans, and we are certainly seeing this manifest itself with respect to the economic downturn," comScore's chairman Gian Fuloni said.
Andrew Lipsman, the spokesman for the Reston, Va.-based company, said the search terms they studied were not the overall most popular terms, which on any given day could be "Britney Spears," or Wednesday's most searched term on Yahoo, "Audrina Patridge," a reality television star who had a break-in at her house.
On Google, "Portuguese water dog" was very popular after the White House released word that the president's family would be looking for one to adopt. "Lake Joccassee" in South Carolina also was high on the search list after a hotel was located 300 feet underwater in what used to be a valley but is now a lake formed by a dam.
Lipsman said the real information is in the relational aspects of terms from one time to another.
"The delta, the percentage change, over a year ago is the most telling," he said about the economic terms.
As a digital marketing intelligence company, comScore studies the use of the Internet to predict future behavior. It doesn't predict when the economic downturn will end and such terms as "economic recovery" will make it onto the search-engine hit list.
(Ann Belser can be reached at abelser(at)post-gazette.com.)
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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