WebProNews

Search terms reflect economic concerns

Patrolling the search engines for deals led to plenty of queries for items with the terms 'discount', 'cheap', or 'free' attached to them.

Judging by the assessment presented by Heather Hopkins in her post at Hitwise, we're a country of easy to satisfy people. We want discount tires, cheap tickets, and oh yeah, free porn.

Hopkins' look at the most popular search terms including value words like those mentioned, along with 'prices', 'deals', and 'used', showed some unsurprising interests. For the four weeks ending August 2nd, oil prices and gas prices topped that list of terms for searchers, for example.

'Used cars' held interest for searchers, along with 'used cars for sale' and 'used auto parts'. Persistently high gas prices likely spurred some of this, as car buyers sought ways to mitigate gas prices that soared above $4 per gallon in the US.

"The broad themes for each of these qualifiers remains the same as last year with 'discount' applying to consumer goods, 'cheap' to travel, 'free' to low price point items, 'deals' to travel and 'used' to books and cars," Hopkins said.

Oil prices generated several new queries compared to last year when Hitwise first took this look at search terms tied to those qualifiers. In 2007, only a couple of queries about oil made the top ten list of queries associated with 'prices'.