How do search queries come into existence?

For anyone following Eliot Spitzer a new phrase appeared this morning Ashley Alexandra Dupre. Ms. Dupre is the second most searched term for March 13th on Google. She is the intended result of 6 out of the top twenty searches. Think about that for a minute, a significant portion of Google searches in the first 12 hours of the day have been 6 phrases that all want the same thing.

A popular concept like the disgrace of a Mayor or the killing of a graduate student drive people’s curiosity and hundreds of questions come to mind. For the most part queries come into existence from a question. Who is Spitzer’s girl?

Why do they change?

After being in search for a short time you will notice that the phrases people use do change. But why? Because they don’t get what they want, or they are presented with a new version of their question. Back in September 2007 nude pictures of Vanessa Hudgens appeared on the Internet. For the month hundreds of strange phrases appeared including Hutchinz nude, hundred nude, Vanessa hundred and many many strange misspellings. Many of these searches found me, because I wrote about Vanessa Fox Nude and later posted Three Nude Vanessas. Over the next few months I watched as searches changed because I did not fulfill the needs of searchers. I did not offer any nudity and as more coverage of the pictures arrived on the scene fewer people misspelled Vanessa’s name — I still rank high for Vanessa Hundred.

How do they change?

Often they become more specific. Since September I have cataloged more than 200 variations of Vanessa del Rio. At first I received traffic on the simple search. In spite of the post where I answer questions like where she lives and that she has a Myspace I am not very relevant for that search and I am an appropriate #89 for Vanessa del rio. However, I am #9 for Vanessa del Rio nude and on the first page for many other +1 word searches. General phrases tend to be very cluttered so people refine to more exact queries or change words to compensate.

The other way that queries change is when new words or phrases are introduced to an industry like the occurrence of owner and seller financing in 2007 the concept is not new, but the search traffic is. So how do you build a query space?

Building Queries

An example from the Northwest are companies like Stoel Rives or Major Blinds who use radio ads to build brand searches. But a company like Stoel Rives is easily mis-searched — 3 common misspellings for Stoel and 2 common misspellings of Rives. So they use phrases like employment law or window covering in there radio ads to seed searches that relate to their business. Radio is one of the least appreciated channels for the web. More than 90% of the US (over 12 years old) listens to the radio on a daily basis.

The important thing is not the channel, it is the content. The words we use are the words that other people use. When you make take on a phrase and champion it on site, in your speech and in your offline references you create a seed for queries and create a new space. A large percentage of search is still unique queries. Don’t let yourself be pinned in by the current available interest. Any cluttered query space is ripe to plucked by creating a better query.