Wordtracker recently came out with a very interesting new tool, which instead of showing you keyword related searches, will come up with what questions searchers have typed directly into their partner search engines, and their frequency in the last 140 days.
For example, when I typed in the keyword “rowing,” questions returned include:
What muscles does rowing work?
What is the best rowing machine?
I’m sure we can see that this has the potential to be a very powerful tool indeed for sites who can find much asked questions related to their industry. Coupled with a well optimized landing page, answering a potential customer’s specific question could go a long way to gaining them as a customer. This could perhaps be especially powerful for information-based products.
However, when I entered the phrase “phone numbers” (I’m working on a UK-based phone number merchant site at the moment), some very different results appeared:
Wow! Not only did I find nothing useful for selling phone numbers, I also found out two disturbing things: People really want to find out celebrities’ phone numbers, and they also seem to think that they will actually be freely available online! I’m not sure which is more worrying. (Well, probably the stalking thing now that I think about it).
Seeing this, I thought it might be interesting to compare questions on some prominent world figures, namely George Bush, his replacement Barack Obama, and our own Gordon Brown.
The results for Bush looked like this (note questions 7 and 12):
It seems a fair amount of people were also concerned about Obama’s height, and aside from small questions about morality and constitutional violation, his top 20 results were very similar:
More worryingly if we scroll further down on Obama’s results we see:
Now to look at the results for Gordon Brown:
Oh dear. In fairness the results only return questions asked in the US versions of Wordtracker’s partner search engines, so perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised at the lack of interest in our own Prime Minister (correct at time of going to press), but there are some worrying elements there.
Perhaps the questions on Obama’s assassination are not such a big surprise, but I’m wondering why people want to know when this will happen, and how they think the internet will know? Last time I checked, oracle.com was still just a business software company, not an actual oracle.
What also intrigues me is the obsession with the height of US presidents. Is this a deciding factor in supporting one candidate or another? Perhaps when finding the wikianswers pages for Obama and Bush, a hundred or so Americans decided that they did indeed need a much taller man as president, then went ahead and ticked a box for Obama. Seems as good a reason as any to cast your vote, eh?
More likely looking at some of the other questions, certain people were after height figures so that they could more accurately calculate trajectories from the windows of tall buildings. Forward planning sure makes those assassination attempts go so much smoother.
So there you have it. Wordtracker has a great new tool which can make you money, and the internet is used for stalking celebs and planning assassinations. Here ends today’s lesson. Oh, and has anybody got Kelly Brook’s phone number?
Michael Theodoulou
