Back on Sunday TechCrunch posted an article on which platform provided the best trending topics and concluded that Google appear to be behind Bing when it comes to search trends. With the news of the passing of Michael Jackson I thought this would be a good opportunity to explore whether this holds true for a major breaking story such as that of Michael Jackson’s untimely death. So within moments of finding out about it late last night I looked into the search trends tools for Google, Bing, and Twitter.
Let’s start with Google Trends. The data that came back to me had no mention of Michael Jackson’s death and the graph showed no major spike in traffic. This is a fail in my eyes and provides further evidence that Google is in fact behind in the search trends.
However, Google did display related news articles in their main search results through universal search, suggesting it’s Google Trends that is off the pace and not Google as a whole.
Now let’s move onto Bing. Interestingly Bing’s xRank did provide information about Michael Jackson from news channels but displayed no major spike in traffic.
Another interesting note is that the list for topped ranked celebrities for Thursday 25th June showed Michael Jackson in 4th place which was indicated as a drop in rankings!
Twitter on the other hand showed a much more updated and accurate depiction of how things really were when using Twist. The data showed a major spike in Traffic that climbed from around 9 o’ clock in the evening until 11.
Twist also shows the top trending subject at that very moment and lo and behold Michael Jackson topped the list. From this I guess we can arrive at the conclusion that Twitter provides the most accurate depiction on the search trends at that very moment.
To take it a step further I also analysed the use of hashtags on the subject of Michael Jackson. The data I found was a major spike in traffic and information on the fact that Michael Jackson had indeed died.
These findings are worrying for Google. Bing’s results are by no means impressive and Twitter blows them out of the water however Google are behind both of them but quite a distance. If real time search is indeed the future, then it’s becoming more and more apparent that Google is falling several steps behind.
June 26th, 2009 at 3:12 pm
Interesting report. How did you come to the conclusion that Bing was more on the ball than Google with this trend?
June 26th, 2009 at 3:22 pm
Thanks for the comment Michael. I guess we could say they are not really any better in terms of being on the ball then Google but the fact that they included updated news reports next to the trends would make it appear a bit fresher. Perhaps it is more of a case that Bing have a better reporting tool than Google and perhaps they are both equally poor at trending topics.