Olympics Bring Gold Medal Traffic to Google and Yahoo!
Want to know if Apolo Ohno has a girlfriend? There’s a search for that.
Major sporting events always turn up the heat on search competition and the 2010 Winter Olympics are no different. Searches for the Vancouver event are up – way up. It seems people are finding the interpipes an invaluable source of information for the winter games.
The Google Retail blog reported that Olympics-related searches are spiking.
Compared to the 2006 Torino Winter Olympics, searches are nearly doubled this go around.
Specifically, people seem to be liking the fashions on display in Vancouver:
Yahoo!’s Olympic stats are also impressive. According to comScore, their Winter Games coverage attracted 9.3 million unique visitors. Yahoo! Sports’ coverage is outperforming NBC’s own Olympics site, which saw 7.6 million uniques. They also beat out ESPN.com which saw 8.4 million unique visitors.
So what are the masses searching? A little bit of everything.
- Searches for “Shaun White snowboarding” are up 1,921%
- Searches for Lindsey Vonn are nearly 6 times higher than for Shaun White and are up are up 1,446%
- Searches for “Apolo Ohno girlfriend” are up 1,210% in the past week, while searches for his bio are up 261% this week.
- Hockey is the number one sport searched this week and searches are up 1,650%
- Searches for curling have spiked 2,833%