Do you know your famous dates from history? Got anything for the 11th of April 1954? Well don’t worry – you can carry on going for the brown pie in Trivial Pursuit. Because that is the date identified by a team of Cambridge scientists as ‘the most boring date in history’.

Nothing Happened!

It was the only day in the 20th century that was devoid of any major news events, even the birth or death of anyone famous. All that happened was a General Election… in Belgium.

This date was uncovered by the scientists who were in the process of developing a new search engine comprised of millions of facts spread out over history. The aim was to create a database which made searching for particular days and events much easier.

The search engine has been given the name TrueKnowledge.com and the strapline “The Internet answer engine”. The project is led by William Reeve, who founded ScreenSelect.co.uk which merged with LOVEFiLM in 2006.

A spokesman commented “The irony is that having done the calculation, the day is now interesting for being exceptionally boring. Perhaps we need to calculate the second most boring day”.

Take a look at TrueKnowledge.com and let us know what you think.

We don’t often comment on celebrity comings and goings, except when it crosses over into online. So here’s one that fits the bill: Cheryl Cole is now the most searched for celebrity on the Internet.

According to online measurement firm Hitwise, the X Factor judge saw off competition from both Justin Bieber and Katy Perry to claim number 1 spot.

Cheryl topples Martin Lewis from the top. Others in the top 10 include Katy Perry, Justin Bieber, Cher Lloyd, Lady Gaga, Robert Pattinson, John Lennon, Katie Price and Megan Fox.

Cheryl didn’t have it all her own way – during his recent contract negotiations Wayne Rooney briefly claimed the prize.

The most popular category was singers, followed by actors and sports stars.

Cheryl also experienced a search surge during her recent bout of malaria.

So have you been searching for Cheryl online? Who has been your most searched for individual? Leave us a comment below.

Data from UK online monitoring firm Hitwise has revealed that for the first time we are visiting social networking websites more than search engines. In May 2010, visits to social networks made up 11.88% of the total, compared to 11.33% to search engines.

Here’s the graph, reproduced from Hitwise:

Of the social networking sites, Facebook makes up 55% of visits, the biggest by a long way.

YouTube takes up 2nd place, followed by Twitter in 3rd. Again, here’s the info direct from Hitwise:

Facebook still lags well behind Google as the most popular website. but whilst Google market share is broadly static, Facebook in on the rise.

Here’s another graph from Hitwise:

You know what I’m going to say don’t you?!

This highlights the increasing importance of using Social Networking websites to find new visitors for your site. Make sure you Integrate your website with Facebook and Twitter. Add a Twitter feed to your website. And of course you can now add a Facebook ‘like’ button to your website too.

Have you had good success reaching out to new visitors from social networks? Has this been on the rise? Leave us a comment below.

There’s been a lot written about Rupert Murdoch’s plan to start charging for access to the Times website.

The fact that your can read newspaper websites for free has meant that many people no longer choose to buy the paper version. And since advertising revenues for websites are much lower than their printed counterparts, the Times – like all other national papers – have been losing money hand over fist.

Most recent figures are that the Times lost £87m in the last year alone.

So Rupert Murdoch is making the brave step of trying to charge users for access to the news on its website.

This is a huge challenge for two separate reasons:

1. Why pay when you can get it for free

With all other newspaper websites, not to mention the BBC, giving away access to the news for free, why would people pay to get the same information for the Times?

Niche newspapers and journals such as the FT have been successful at charging for online content, but only because they have specialist journalists delivering information that can’t be found elsewhere. That’s hardly the case with the Times.

2. Search Engines can’t spider the content

A key source of traffic to newspaper websites is Google and other search engines. Web users often search online for the latest news and events, and as newspaper websites have a rolling delivery of the latest developments they are often the recipients of visitors from search.

By introducing a paywall, Murdoch is blocking the ability for search engines to ‘read’ the latest content that is added to The Times website. And if search engines can’t read it, then they can’t rank it higher in the search engine results page.

What is everyone else doing?

Other news providers have rejected charging for content. Some favour a system of micropayments that would allows users to make small payments for access to specific niche content. Others – such as the Guardian – have introduced a paid-for iPhone app that gives users a ‘personalised’ version of the news.

A good innovation?

Despite these factors, News International are pressing ahead with their plans. Since they are losing money anyway, perhaps they see no alternative. Murdoch reckons that he’d rather have fewer customers who were paying. And he has always been a good innovator – look at Sky.

What do you think of the plans? Would you be prepared to pay for access to the news? Leave us a comment below.

Last year we talked about the Google SearchWiki. This allowed users to personalise their search results by promoting or excluding specific results from the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).

It’s all part of Google’s long term view of search as being specifically tailored to each individual user.

A couple of weeks ago they added a new feature, which makes use of ‘Star’ icons. This is where they appear (marked in red):

At the same time Google have terminated their SearchWiki. Apparently users didn’t make much use of the service. Users were concerned that they were artificially changing the order of Google’s organic search results, and preferred to have the order decided by Google

This means that the new stars are actually replacing the SearchWiki, and will act as a more lightweight way of doing things.

How do you use it?

Users can use the stars as a way of marking and then ‘rediscovering’ web pages that they like and think are more important to them.

In order to make use of the new service, just click on the star marker by the result you want highlight. The next time you carry out a similar search, the items you previously starred will appear in a special list right at the top of the results.

You can also add new web pages to the starred list whilst you are off browsing the web. Just click on the star icon and the web page is added to your list.

The new star feature also synchronizes with your Google Toolbar and your Google Bookmarks.

Try using the new star feature and let us know whether you think it’s any good!

According to a recent report by website monitoring firm ComScore, Internet users love affair with search engines continues to deepen.

For the month of December 2009, worldwide search volumes increased by a massive 46% over the same month in 2008. That means there that just in December there were 131bn searches, more than 4bn for every day of the month.

The country with the most searches was the US, with 17% of the global share. The UK hit a total of 6.2bn searches, more than punching its weight per head of population. That’s 100 searches for everyone in the country, and is a 35% increase year on year.

And which search engines are being used? Of course its Google who dominates, with 67% of the global search volume. Google grew by 58% over the 12 month period. But it was a great year for Microsoft, who saw a huge 70% growth year on year, from 2.4bn to 4.1bn searches. Yahoo was up a much more modest 13%, hitting 9.4bn.

And as have mentioned previously, it is Facebook that has also hit the search headlines, delivering 1.5bn searches, up 54% year on year.

“The global search market continues to grow at an extraordinary rate, with both highly developed and emerging markets contributing to the strong growth worldwide. Search is clearly becoming a more ubiquitous behaviour among internet users, which drives navigation not only directly from search engines but also within sites and across networks”, said Jack Flanagan, executive VP at ComScore.

Do you always search on Google? How can you be sure that you prefer it? Why not take a blind search test? And then leave us a comment below.

Some research by Comscore, an online traffic measurement company, came out last week. It was covered in some depth over on Techcrunch.

The research is based on US traffic, but it applies here too.

Comscore have basically found that whilst the number of searches rose last year by 68%, the number of clicks on search advertisements went up by just 18%.

Here’s a graph that shows it all:

Comscore are attributing the relative decline in clicks compared to searches to the increasing length of search queries. They say that as the number of 3, 4 or 5 word searches increases, (something we’ve discussed before) adverts are less likely to appear because advertisers are less like to have those word combinations in their AdWords account.

Comscore say: “And this apparently reduces the likelihood that an advertiser has bid to have his/her ad included in the results page from these longer queries, due to paid search advertising strategies that limit ad coverage, such as Exact Match, Negative Match, and bid management software campaign optimization.”

Techcrunch think that this doesn’t explain it enough. They reckon that clicks on adverts have declined because many US advertisers have reduced or stopped their AdWords campaigns.

They say: “Sharper Image, Wickes Furniture, Levitz, Foot Locker, Wilson’s Leather, Ann Taylor, Zales, Mervyn’s, Macy’s, Circuit City and a ton of other retailers are either shutting down entirely or closing lots of stores… All of these companies used to spend tons of money on paid search ads. Those budgets don’t exist any more.”

Another idea is that as Google gets better at displaying more relevant results pages (SERPs), maybe users are less drawn to the sponsored AdWords ads because they find what they want in the organic listings. I haven’t got any evidence for that, it just seems like logical conclusion.

Whatever the reason, once again its a good opportunity for your to get your website to the top of the SERPs. Make sure you are ranking highly for the specific search phrases that people will use that are relevant to your website. Follow our Search Engine Optimisation guide (SEO) to help you achieve that.

Do you find yourself clicking less on ads these days? Or have you never done so? Leave us a comment below.

With a bank holiday approaching, there’s a lot of weather related chatter going on.  In the office we’ve been talking about stuff like how busy the campsites are, and how choked the roads will become. But as we’ve mentioned before, the weather has a big impact on the sort of things people search for online.

There is of course the obvious stuff: bad weather brings about a surge in searches for weather websites, as Brits look for a break in the clouds.

But also there is the range of activities that warmer weather brings with it. If search engines are anything to go by, the first thing on people’s minds when the sun comes out is the garden. The Hitwise ‘Hot Consumer Electronics List’ shows that garden related search queries have trebled over the last few weeks.

Here’s the top 10:

1  black and decker
2. lawn mowers
3. flymo
4. black & decker
5. petrol lawn mowers
6. petrol lawnmowers
7. petrol lawn mower
8. cheap garden furniture
9. lawnmower
10. lawnmowers

Of course the take away point if you’re selling any garden or weather related equipment is to have a list of keywords sorted out well in advance of this surge. You need to make sure your website is ranking well in the Search Engine Results Page (SERPS) for your important keywords – follow our search engine optimisation guide for the best advice. But owing to the length of time Google takes to crawl changes on your site, its best to make sure you’ re working on your SEO programme through the winter, so that come springtime you’re ready to take advantage.

For those of us not selling this stuff; is there a weather or summer related angle you could give to your site? For example, if you run a B&B take the opportunity to add in a page about the weather in the local area, and optimise that page for local weather keywords. You might well be able to pick up some extra traffic.

Have any of you taken advantage of weather related searches to boost traffic to your site? Leave us a comment below.

More research from HitWise this week reveals the subjects that we, as a nation, are most interested in.

Hitwise analysed the top 1,500 search terms from Google, Yahoo and MSN for the last three months of 2008. They then placed each search term in a category. For example, the search term ‘the apprentice’ was placed in the category ‘TV’; and ‘Coldplay’ was in ‘Music’.

And the result? It seems that as a nation we’re obsessed with TV and online gaming. If you take out non-brand searches, over 14% of searches are related to TV, and just under 14% are related to Online Gaming (such as World of Warcraft). The next three categories are Travel, Sport and Finance.

Breaking it down further, the most popular search terms in the TV category were ‘strictly come dancing’, ‘eastenders’, ‘x factor’ and TV listings. So as we mentioned in our blog post about the UK’s most searched for celebrity, we haven’t completely lost our interest in pop, soaps and that sort of thing.

Delving further into the other top categories, here’s the top search terms for each sector:

Online gaming:
games
free online games
car games
free games
cooking games (really!)

Travel:
train times
cheap flights
cheap holidays

9 out of the top 10 sport related terms were football related, with ‘arsenal’ topping the list. ‘F1′ was the only one from any other sport.

And when it comes to finance, the list was headed by ‘currency converter’. The words ‘exchange rate’ were right up there too. So it seems the weakness of the pound is on lots of people’s minds.

What does this mean if you’re a website builder? Well one thing to take from it is that if your business or hobby falls into one of the popular search areas, you have the potential to get lots of visitors to your website. Follow our search engine optimisation guide (SEO) to maximise your chances. Of course what also might be true is that since these are the most popular search terms, they might be the most competitive too. Therefore work out which niche you are best catering for, and concentrate your SEO in that area. For example, if you run a B&B in Somerset, near Exmoor and you specialise in horse riding too, then make sure you’re optimising not just for ‘B&B’ and ‘Somerset’, but also ‘Exmoor’, the local town, and possibly horse riding in Somerset, Exmoor, and the local town.

What are you searching for right now? Leave a comment below.

More research from HitWise, the website traffic measurement company, was out this week. This time it revealed the most searched for celebrities in the UK. This is a top ten long dominated by the stars of pop and soap, and closely mirrors the amount of coverage they generate in the red tops.

So who is the top this year then? Paris Hilton? Jordan? It’s perhaps an indication of these austere times, or maybe a drop in the intensity of our celebrity obsession, but these year’s list topper isn’t a star of screen or stage, but a hero of frugality instead. Martin Lewis, the person behind ‘consumer revenge’ website Money Saving Expert was the most searched for personality in the three months ending January 2009. On top of that, Martin’s website moneysavingexpert.com was the 100th most visited site in the last 3 months.

Second in the list was Barack Obama, another sensible persons’ search term. Barack received 11% less searches than Martin.

The presence in the top ten of a couple of WAGs and some other tabloid fodder shows we haven’t completely turned our backs on ‘traditional’ celebrities.

Here’s the full list:

1. Martin Lewis
2. Barack Obama
3. Diana Vickers
4. Britney Spears
5. Leona Lewis
6. Cheryl Cole
7. Georgina Baillie
8. Miley Cyrus
9. Nicola Mclean
10. Katy Perry

Well I suppose a straw poll of us website builders might reveal a different list again. We’re all searching for heroes of the web, aren’t we? Like Tim Berners-Lee- the ‘founder of the Internet? Another might be Bill Gates? Eric Schmidt (Google CEO)? Or maybe Jakob Nielsen (the website usability guru)?

Who is in your top 10? Leave us a comment below.