The MPs’ expenses scandal has been rumbling on for what seems like weeks now. And whilst MPs hang their heads in shame, and commentators lament the corruption of our elected representatives, research from Hitwise UK shows that the news is having a big impact on what we’re searching for.

The graph below shows the growth in searches for a group of keywords related to the story. These have increased by 575%, and all indications are that there is more growth to come.

Most of the expenses related search terms are general. Further down the list however you can find the names of specific Mps, and of course ‘expenses keywords’ used in conjunction with ‘Telegraph’

Given his relatively minor expenses story, its perhaps surprising that Gordon Brown is the most frequently mentioned MP, followed by Barbara Follett.

The data is of course slightly old by now – we will update the story if it radically changes.

Here are the top search terms:

1. mps expenses (21.7% of all searches) for terms in the MPs’ Expenses portfolio)
2. mp expenses (14.4%)
3. mp’s expenses (5.2%)
4. mp expenses list (4.3%)
5. mps expenses list (2.6%)
6. gordon brown expenses (2.1%)
7. barbara follett expenses (1.9%)
8. telegraph expenses (1.7%)
9. ministers expenses (1.7%)
10. mps’ expenses (1.65)

Whilst it is MPs who are rightly paying the price for their transgressions, the website of The Telegraph is the main beneficiary.

Last week telegraph.co.uk picked up over 30% of all clicks in the organic search results for expenses related search queries. Other winners were Google News UK, followed by political site TheyWorkForYou.com. All the rest of the top 10 were all news media sites.

Here’s what happened to telegraph.co.uk’s market share of News related Internet traffic:

Hitwise also point out that not only has visits to telepgraph.co.uk gone up, average time on site has increased from 8 to 9 minutes. So people are going more frequently to the website, and they like what they find there. All increasing the telegraph.co.uk’s advertising revenue.

And of course, if people spend more time on the site, they’re probably looking at more pages. Here’s a graph of the telegraph’s page views:

Has the scandal shaped what you’ve searched for? Are you a new convert to telegraph.co.uk? Are you trying to grab some search traffic by using the website builder to add MPs expenses keywords onto your site? Or have you had enough of the whole episode! Leave us a comment below.