It’s spawned its own variety of voyeurism, for God’s sake, making some very sick people an awful lot of money and losing a lot of sick kids future earnings in decent jobs in the process. I went with this accompanying picture because an image search for spring break yields some pretty gawdawful pictures that I’ll leave to you to explore, if you care to. I certainly don’t anymore.

So, what does spring break mean most to those searching for it? Let’s take a look.

Spring Break generates an average of 201,000 monthly searches, peaking in march, trailing into April and staying pretty low key the rest of the year. The traffic trails off a bit at this point, with Spring Break 08 the next highest source with 22,000. Given that this is based on last year’s data, Spring Break 09 is probably due to reach this spot this year. Though the, ahem, ‘activities’ phase tends to drive plenty of traffic as we’ll see shortly, getting there remains an important task at hand. Spring break vacations averages 5,400 searches per month, also peaking in March – a little earlier planning might save travelling students some beer book money down the line. Spring break packages is good for 2,400 per month, while 1,900 per month opt for a spring break cruise instead. Surprisingly, spring break deals only generates 1,900 searches per month – probably because said travels are usually planned on someone else’s dime?

Cancun tops the destinations at 4,400 search es per month for Cancun Spring Break, with Panama City driving 3,600, South Padre at 1,600, and Acapulco with 1,000. 58 opt for sunny New York.

This is where we return to the top of the list and prepare to throw our dignity to the wind. Spring break photos and Spring break videos generate 9,900 searches per month, with the buzz lasting through April before falling off. What kinds of pictures are people hoping to see? Spring break flashing, probably, given the 5,400 searches per month it attracts, which peak in July and August – well past the traditional window set by other terms. Spring break nude is good for 2,900 searches per month, but I’m sure you’re already quite familiar with that Mr. Sicko. It only gets worse after that; every combination of ‘wild’, ‘girl’ ‘nudity’ ‘topless’ ’sex’ ‘xxx’ and ‘hot’ are all represented at kind of disturbing levels. If you arrived at this page looking for any of the above, Search Engine Snark prescribes finding a mirror and a good, long look at yourself. On the other hand if your faith in humanity needs a little reality check, spend a little time in the adwords keyword tool on this one, and be sure to leave the filters off.

Some interesting long-tail searches that came up:

• MIT spring break: 73 searches/month – Probably a lame concept, but with a sliver of hope to be exceptionally cool
• Spring break wiki, Spring break forum: 170 searches/month - Have we become so dependent on technology that a week of sun and surf needs a damn wiki or forum?
• Spring break 1899: 46 searches/month – What, looking for scandalous shots of Edith Carrow Roosevelt? Well, they’re not there, I’ve already looked!

Weigh all the searches above against this last one: Spring break missions was good for 36 searches per month.

Let us pray.

Post from: Search Engine Snark

Search of the Day: Spring Break

Incidentally, that’s what I put as the tiebreaker final score in my bracket this year. Maybe that’s why my co-workers are laughing at me in the halls. Yeah. That’s gotta be why.

Either that or jealousy of my dancing skills, which are often spontaneously on display in the main conference room. Some people just gotta hate the player…

Post from: Search Engine Snark

Search of the Day: Final Four

In any case, yesterday we looked at searches for prom in general and prom dresses. Today, we’ll take a look at the best of the rest.

What major event in anyone’s life would be complete without four hours in a salon for about two hours of effect? Prom Hairstyles drives an amazing 165,000 searches per month on Google (not to be confused with Prom Hair Styles, which only drives 27,000 – picture above, btw, is the #1 image result on Google for this term), as much as Prom and more than Prom Dress at 110,000 per month – coincidentally, the same search level as Prom Hair, which I prefer to think refers to how one’s hair looks after a night of romance, limo rides, catfights and having it vomited into (see also: Rock hair, roller coaster hair, sex hair, etc). Also on the radar is Prom Updos at 33,000 seaches per month.

Special jewelry? Why not – at 8,800 searches per month, Prom Jewelry is popular enough to probably build a (small) business around, and Prom accessoriesis still no slouch at 2,900 searches per month. In other preparatory news, Prom makeup attracts 6,600 monthly searches.

Guys can play too, though apparently not nearly as hardcore. Prom tuxedos generates 6,600 searches per month on average, with the more informal prom tuxat 3,600. I was surprised to see prom corsage drove an average 4,400 - until I realized that girls probably try to get ideas for prom corsages to pass along to their boyfriends, who will then promptly run out to a grocery store florist anyway.

Seriously yall, this barely scratches the surface. If you’d like a fascinating trip back in time (or a cheap prom dress), spend a quick five minutes in Google’s keyword tool looking at results for prom searches.

Post from: Search Engine Snark

Search of the Day: Prom pt 2 – Hair, makeup and the rest

We hear a lot about how those crazy kids are crazy about this internet thing, let’s take a look at what they’re looking for when it comes to this rite of passage.

Prom, interestingly enough, is not anywhere near the top search phrase for the category – it loses easily to Prom Dresses 165,000 673,000 (Google monthly average). On top of which, Prom Night drives about the same level of traffic – impressive, given that Prom has a few months of building traffic, whereas Prom Night gets one big bump in April. Then there are the themes – because God forbid you throw a party that’s just a party. Disturbingly enough, Ghetto Prom drives the same relative amount of traffic as Prom Themes – about 9,900 per month – with the singular Prom Theme generating about 1,000.

But back to those dresses (AKA Prom Gowns at 22k per month) that everyone seems to care about so much. What are girls (well, mostly girls, it is the 21st century) looking for in a prom dress? With teenagers being so frugal and all, Cheap Prom Dresses pushes 49,500 searches per month. Dads, get ready – Short Prom Dresses runs about 22,000 per searches per month and 8,100 searches per month are for Sexy Prom Dresses. White Prom Dresses seem to be more popular than Black Prom Dresses 5,400 to 4,400, with Pink Prom Dresses at around the same level as the black ones. 1,900 search for Lime Green Prom Dresses and the lowly Yellow Prom Dresses generate 170.

Stylistically, the kids like vintage (8,100/month), gothic (3,600), 80’s (1,900) and punk (1,900). 1,600 searches per month are for Poofy Prom Dresses and Jovani Prom Dresses (9,900) top the designers, with Jessica McClintock (1,900) a distant second and Joli (1,300) and Scala (1,000) round out the dress designers with a higher than 1,000 per month average.

We’ll take a look tomorrow at some other areas that make up prom-based searches. In the meantime, I don’t know about you but I’m going to enjoy not having to go through this crap again and be glad that all I had to worry about were a tux and logistics.

Update: See part 2

Post from: Search Engine Snark

Search of the Day: Prom Part 1: The Basics & Prom Dresses

Fail on its own generates a staggering 368,000 searches per month. If that’s not enough, it’s a term that got very little traffic the same time last year based on search trends available, even though it seems like the meme has been around for awhile - call it a win for fail (or would it be fail fail?). Related extremes of the term also drive significant traffic – epic fail, for example, generates 49,500 Google searches per month (a massive misspelling/complete lack of vocabulary related to this – epoch fail – drives 320). Fail Blog, a top source for fail images and video, gets a crack at 60,500 searches per month for its name alone. Fail pictures drives 5,400 searches per month and fail videos inspires 2,900. Even fail posters drive 720 searches per month – hell, there’s a business model that can be built around it!

What kinds of things are people eager to see fall apart, screw up, or go utterly effing wrong?

• Fail cat: 1,000 searches / month – What meme would be complete without involving copious pictures of cats?
• English fail: 480 searches / month – See also Engrish.
• Dance fail: 390 searches / month - The possibilities are endless.
• Fail train: 260 searches / month - People all over the world, join hands, start a fail train…
• Computer fail: 91 searches / month
• Lyrics fail: 19 searches / month

Post from: Search Engine Snark

Search of the Day: Fail

Average monthly Google searches for:

• NCAA Tournament: 49,500 – The NCAA dominates the Google rankings for this one, with CollegeHoopsNet.com being the highest-ranked commercial site for the key term.
• College Basketball: 49,500 – That’s right, about as many people care about the tournament as they do about College Basketball as a whole. Take a guess when searches for College Basketball peak, too.
• NCAA Basketball Tournament: 33,100 – Same winners as NCAA Tournament, but for some reason this search generates Google News headlines, whereas NCAA Tournmanet does not. Missing out on some page views, Google…
• NCAA Tourney: 3,600 – Yup, even lame spellings can drive some significant traffic. That’s why you do your homework.

Post from: Search Engine Snark

Search of the Day: NCAA Tournament

Standing on its own, ‘awesome’ drives approximately 246,000 searches per month on Google. That’s a hell of a lot for something that, on its own, doesn’t so much mean anything. Ranking #1 for awesome in Google, in case you were wondering: Dictionary.com. Take that for what it’s worth. See also #1 video search result for ‘awesome‘ and image result for ‘awesome‘.

Not surprisingly, it’s misspelled cousin ‘awsome’ is the next closest competitor at 44,600 per month. #1 for ‘awsome’: Urban dictionary. Now we’re getting a little warmer. Next up is ‘awesome god’ at 22,500 - and this is where things start getting fun.

‘Awesome games’ brings in 12,100 per month, along with ‘awesome quotes’. ‘Awesome icons’ registers 8,100 (seriously people, they’re tiny and 8 bit, there’s only so much awesome that can possibly be generated). Awesome names drives 2,400 (assuming the sweetest baby name resource out there). A hunting site known as ‘awesome antlers’ is popular enough to generate 1,000 searches per month, and the ‘awesome man’ video shorts attract 1,600.

Some further tail terms worth noting:

• Awesome in spanish: 140 searches per month – But but but it’s the universal sentiment!
• Awesome questions: 110 searches per month – No word on how many people are looking for the awesome answer.
• Awesome orange: 90 searches per month – What? These things are way too small to really get excited about – what exactly are you doing with these things, man?
• Lord awesome: 46 searches per month – I don’t know about you, but I have a new ambition in life after seeing this…
• To awesome: 12 searches per month – That’s all awesome was really missing: A verb form.

For those who’ve been reading from the start, thank you greatly for your support, or at least for not throwing things at us. For those reading for the first time, there are at least 50 more where  this came from – so get started you lazy, johnny-come-lately jackass. And get me some nachos while you’re up, I’m Lord Awesome and I demand tribute, dammit!

Post from: Search Engine Snark

Search of the Day: Awesome (50th post commemorative edition)

‘Brooklyn New York’ and ‘Bronx New York’, interestingly enough, top the list when looking at search volume for New York, New York City and NYC-based terms, both peaking in January and averaging 368,000 and 246,000 searches per month in respectively. ‘New York City’ and ‘New York NY’ register 246,000 and 201,000 respectively while ‘Queens New York’ is the next closest at 33,100. ‘Harlem New York’  is languishing at a tenth of that level, about the same number of searches for the misspelling ‘Manhatten New York’. No search volume registered for ‘Hell’s Kitchen New York’, in case you were wondering.

What do people want to do in New York? Apparently a healthy portion have no clue, per the 9,990 searches per month for ‘Things to do in New York’ and 8,100 for the same with ‘city’ tacked onto the end. The more easily led drive even more traffic, with ‘New York Tours’ driving 49,500 searches per month.

Not all who wander are lost, however; searches for ‘New York Museums’ (8,100) and ‘New York Restaurants’ (14,100) show that people at least want to see something specific and, you know, eat. The city’s famed shopping, however, drives only 3,600 searches per month and its theater scene drives 2,900 – surprising, given that 5,400 search for Central Park – evidently, seeing vagrants and getting mugged is more popular than vising Time Square.

Other notable searches for which there is Google data:

• New York Parking: 2,900 searches / month: That many searches for what is essentially ‘You’re dreaming’?
• New York City Bars: 1,300 searches / month: That many searches for what is essentially  ‘Look across the damn street, fool?’
• New York directions: 170 searches / month: Just follow the cabs, they always take the shortest route.
• New York City classes: 46 searches / month: AKA extremely poor, extremely rich, those pretend to be extremely rich on the street but are poor enough have no furniture in their apartments and those who would be extremely rich elsewhere and are slowly coming around to that fact.

New York, I love you. Just in small doses.

Post from: Search Engine Snark

Search of the Day: New York

Surprisingly, ‘mortgages’ is not the most searched-for term in this set. Topping the list is ‘mortgage calculator’ with an average of 1 million searches per month – the largest average I’ve seen. Let’s put that in perspective: ’sex videos’ averages the same number. This term peaks in ‘January’ while ‘mortgage’ (at a stratospheric 843,000 per month) peaks in June – presumably people just doing their research well ahead of time…of course, ‘bad credit mortage’ (19,100) peaks in January, also, and ‘refinance mortgage’ (33,100) hits its stride right before ‘mortgage’.

Last year’s term of the year, ’subprime mortgage’ averages 14,800 queries per month, whereas ‘adjustable rate mortgage’ – which is the prettier phrase for how we got here – sits at 12,100. The less sexy but far more stable ‘fixed rate mortgage’ brings in a paltry 5,400 – about half of the volume of ‘interest only mortgage’, an absolute horror of a deal, and a quarter of the volume for ’second mortgage’ at 22,000 per month.

Now, I know that there’s a lot of generic traffic that’s not looking for anything frightening or even specific at all. Hell, the lowest-traffic generic term – home mortgage – is five times the volume for second mortgage. But these numbers opened my eyes a bit to exactly how many people were looking for shady, rotten or outright bad deals that were designed to help in the short term while shafting you over the long haul. There were a lot of jerk banks involved in this who shouldn’t have been making loans they couldn’t have possibly thought would actually get paid out. Lord knows that one of the few banks to come out clean and sober from all of this tried to get us to take out a loan that we couldn’t have afforded for very long just a few short years ago. But to me it looks like there has been plenty of consumer activity around the kinds of mortgage plans that are specifically designed to get you in trouble, too.

Read your contracts and your fine print, people. From a guy in a business that lives and dies on contract terms, for the love of God, read your mortgage paperwork. Every. Last. Piece. Of. Paper. They. Send You.

Post from: Search Engine Snark

Search of the Day: Mortgages

Enter the replica luxury item. If it’s not ringing any bells, check your spam folder – I’m sure there are plenty of companies that want to let you know how you can own a genuine Rolox (as they giggle to themselves – yes, thieves do giggle). From working on PPC and SEO campaigns for designer brands, these things are the bane of my existence; you either have to account for them in negative phrases (or entirely new campaigns) on the paid side, or spend a lot of time trying to find ways around them on the natural side.

But just because they make me miserable doesn’t mean you shouldn’t profit from them, you cheap, noble bastard! Especially with the economy in a slump, what can they really expect?

Replica Watches, averaging more than 40,000 searches per month on Google, tops the list of searched-for genuine fakes, with handbags the next closest competitor at around 22,000. Surprisingly, 8,100 people per month on average search for ‘knock off purse’, with another 6,600 looking for ‘knock off handbags’. In fact, handbags seem to be the main recipient of ‘knock off’ largesse, with sunglasses being the first product out of that category after a long, unbroken chain of purse terms, at about 1,900 per month.

Breitling is the first brand that shows up in analysis of these terms at 2,900 per month and Cartier the next closest at 1,900.

Other products that drive traffic on ‘replica’ or ‘knock off’ terms:

• Replica belts: 880 searches/month – Belts? Seriously? I’m pretty sure you could cover a piece of twine in shoe polish and get away with it as your with-black option nowadays.
• Replica wallets: 880 searches/month – Same thing, only with duct tape.
• Wholesale replica: 390 searches/month – What’s sadder – that this industry exists, or that you can buy from it in bulk?
• Any knock off: 210 searches/month – When you’re just that desperate.
• Replica backpack: 22 searches/month – Anyone else think a backpack is pretty tough thing to fake?
• Replica hobo: insufficient data – For when real hobos are just too damn expensive.

So, if you happened to receive any of these items over the weekend, double-check the label, brand name and appearance and make sure you’re not just getting close to the real thing. I suspect that these numbers will only be going up in the coming months, too, so if you’re a designer brand it’s time to take steps to protect yourself to a further degree.

Post from: Search Engine Snark

Search of the Day: Replicas, Knock-Offs and other fake stuff