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At least Daily Express readers are still searching for Madeleine McCann

Written by Martin Belam
Published 15 February, 2009
Categories: Daily Express, Media, Newspapers, Search

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4 comments so far
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I have a little Perl script that runs each morning, and checks what the popular searches are on the Daily Express website.

I know it is a little childish, but it just amuses me so much that they are obviously editorially chosen rather than a real reflection of what users are doing, and, more importantly, that they seldom ever change.

I got a little bit excited in April last year when they suddenly dropped 'Princess Diana' from the list. The script has been running for a year now, so I'm in a position to produce a table of the most popular search terms on the Daily Express website over the last 365 days.

Search term	Appearances
Madeleine McCann	365
Sunday express	365
Crossword	365
Kate Middleton	365
offers	291
football	290
Crosswords	280
health	264
	202
diana	143
Immigration	137
meal offer	122
madeline	75
mccann	75
maddie	75
madeleine	75
Princess Diana	74
archive	61
radio 2	22
madeline mccann	1

So no one-track mind from the editorial team populating that search promo then!

Incidentally, the blank space in my table isn't a mistake - for 202 days of the year the box had a random empty line in the middle and nobody seemed to notice...

Posted by Martin Belam, February 15, 2009
Read the latest posts about: Daily Express, Media, Newspapers, Search
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4 comments so far

Matthew Mayer commented on February 15, 2009:

Was wondering, is it possible that rather than being editorially chosen, the links are "self-fulfilling"... ie, by clicking on any of the results, a new search is generated. Its therefore very hard for a new search term to break into the top 10 because the current top 10 always receive lots of traffic (perhaps even from search engine spiders, etc).

Martin Belam replied on February 15, 2009:

I'm sure it is possible, but it doesn't seem very likely. The top search list only appears on the search results page, and so the chances are that the majority of searchers enter their terms from the home page or an article page, not as a second search having seen the list. It seems incredible to me that terms like Olympics, Obama, credit crunch, recession, Brand and Ross, and baby p were not search for more on the Express site than 'offers' and 'Kate Middleton'

Adam from PageRush commented on February 16, 2009:

This is unfortunate, think of all the excellent real searches we are missing out on! Hopefully the Daily Express will see this and hire you to implement a widget displaying the actual searches.

Anon commented on February 16, 2009:

Of course you'd have to ask yourself why, if it is editorially driven, these results would show items such as 'Crossword' which really wouldn't do it much good, given it's essentially off site content.

Perhaps it's more possible than you'd think, that these are in fact genuine results.

:-)

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