OMG! They are not searching for 'Princess Diana' anymore at the Daily Express!

I've mentioned before that I have a little Perl script that keeps an eye on the 'Most popular searches' at the Daily Express site. Each day it faithfully goes and checks what they are, and then alerts me with a 'VROOT! VROOT!' email if anything changes. This morning the alarm went off for the first time in 74 days. The Express has finally changed the list of what users are most looking for, by altering two of the terms.

You may recall that the list was dominated by references to Madeleine McCann - even after the public apology to the McCanns had denuded the website of all of the archived stories about the case.

The first change the Express has made is to remove the blank line that had been appearing in the list for nearly three months now. 'Offers' has been added as a one word commercially-tinged search terms.

The second change has been to replace Princess Diana in the list....with 'madeline mccann'. Of the ten popular searches listed, 6 are now related to Madeleine.

• madeleine
• Madeleine McCann
• mccann
• Crossword
• Kate Middleton
• maddie
• sunday express
• madeline
• offers
• madeline mccann

They might be popular search terms, but as links they are not terrible useful. Clicking through for a search on 'madeline mccann' produces no results. The one word search 'madeline' produces one result - about auditions for Harry Potter. Because of the mass deletion, even the proper search for 'Madeleine McCann' only yields four stories.

Fortunately, there is still room to reference the late Princess somewhere on the Daily Express search page - her name remains the suggested example of what to search for.

Posted by Martin Belam, April 30, 2008
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