Search and news stories are very closely related. In this age of watching TV with laptop at hand, we tend to search for things we see on the TV – and the CES flood of internet TV applications and hardware attests to this – it is no wonder the predicted top of the NFL draft decision to stay in school would get people searching for more information.
Google trends shows how much this one news article has swamped the search engine,
The social media has also been filled with mentions of Luck. To show how much this particular story shows how news impacts, look at the other hot search – Elizabeth Edwards will. The chart below shows while Edwards has spiked in relation to their usual numbers, Luck has blown up across all searches.
This type of spike for specific event news can be mined by some, but it also brings waves of traffic to various sites that have ranked well for some long tail pages in search results.and many of these are not ready to deal with it.
It makes a good cause to set up email alerts for traffic spikes, so you can react to opportunities – grab some Adsense, sign up for anything associated with the news topic.
Looking at Luck’s dominance of Andrew L shows the impact and will be interesting to see how long it lasts. Another note is the promoted Tweet by Discover in the Real Time results.
And I just saw the Bay Citizen jump in for cheap traffic to their site – is it an arbitrage move or an attempt to increase readers?
Search and news – sometimes you can predict part of it and develop long term strategies for it – Super Bowl location stories written months in advance etc. are some ways – but jumping on breaking news search terms is a play some have developed to much success.