SEARCHES FOR 'BIRD FLU' INCREASE BY MORE THAN 450%
CDC and News Sites receive interest
NEW YORK, Oct. 18, 2005— With the outbreak of the bird flu in Southeast Asia and the first reported case in Europe on Saturday, the possibility that the virus will spread to the U.S. has increased. The threat of a pandemic has generated huge desire for more information on the situation among the U.S population and President George W. Bush has announced efforts to confront the disease.
According to Hitwise, the world's leading online competitive intelligence service, U.S. searches for "bird flu" surged 466 percent during the week ending Oct. 15, 2005 versus two weeks prior (week ending Oct. 1, 2005), indicating heightened research on the virus. Another site which has seen increases in traffic as a direct result of the outbreak is the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) website (www.cdc.gov), which hosts the latest information regarding the virus. In the past two weeks, the site's market share of visits has increased by 18 percent.
"If panic surrounding the bird flu continues to spread around the world, Internet searches on "bird flu" and avian flu will be an indication of the extent of the concern," said Bill Tancer, general manager of worldwide research at Hitwise. "It will be interesting to see if this concern has any impact on online travel research to Europe and Asia in the coming weeks."
Searches on bird flu terms use varying keywords
Hitwise Search Intelligence data reports that U.S Internet users are using more than 900 search terms in their quest for information searching. The most popular search terms included "bird flu", "avian flu", "bird flu symptoms", "asian bird flu", "avian bird flu", and "bird flu vaccine".
For the four weeks ending Oct. 1, 2005, 23 percent of Internet searches for the term "bird flu" directly resulted in a visit to the CDC site (www.cdc.gov). Other sites to receive visits from this term include news sites like Google News (news.google.com), NPR (www.npr.org) and BBC News (news.bbc.co.uk) as well as the sites Nature.com (www.nauture.com) and PRB Pharmaceuticals (www.prbpharmaceuticals.com).
Top 10 sites receiving visits from the term "bird flu"
Period - 4 weeks ending October 15, 2005
Sites receiving visits from the search term "bird flu"
Rank
Domain
Volume of Visits
1.
www.cdc.gov
23.35%
2.
news.google.com
9.78%
3.
www.npr.org
5.19%
4.
news.bbc.co.uk
4.89%
5.
www.nature.com
3.99%
6.
www.prbpharmaceuticals.com
3.09%
7.
www.msnbc.com
2.89%
8.
www.yahoo.com
2.69%
9.
www.cnn.com
2.69%
10.
www.antisepticusa.com
2.40%
Contact: For media inquiries or to schedule an analyst interview, please contact Lizzie Babarczy: press@hitwise.com (212) 380 2910.
About Hitwise:
Hitwise is the world's leading online competitive intelligence service. Each day, Hitwise monitors how more than 25 million Internet users interact with over 500,000 websites across 160 industry categories.
By monitoring more people, more websites, more often, Hitwise provides marketers with timely and actionable marketing insights on how their online presence compares to competitive websites. Companies use this information to maximize the return on their online investment, in efforts such as search marketing, affiliate programs, online advertising, visitor segmentation, content development and lead generation.
Hitwise collects Internet usage information via a combination of ISP data partnerships and opt-in mega panels, and complies with local and international privacy legislation as audited by PricewaterhouseCoopers. Founded in 1997, Hitwise is a privately held company, headquartered in New York City and operates in the US, UK, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong and Singapore.
More information about Hitwise is available at www.hitwise.com
