Celebrity news flood results in huge traffic surge for Google News UK

Last March, Hitwise highlighted how Google News UK picks up more traffic from searches for celebrities than any other type of news, ensuring that the news search engine largely remains the greater source of traffic for News and Media websites. Now Hitwise has released some stats that clearly depict this trend, with thanks to the uptick of news related to a variety of celebrities that took the Internet by storm the past week.

According to Hitwise, Google News UK was the second biggest recipient of searches by UK-based Internet users for ‘patrick swayze’ and ‘kanye west’ (picking up 8.25% and 8.26% of traffic respectively), third for ‘katie price’ (9.29%) and fourth for ‘keith floyd’ (5.28%). As a result, visits to the regional news search engine increased a whopping 71% last week, with the site’s ranking reaching the one of 28th most popular overall (up from 46th the previous week).

In other words: last week was Google News UK’s busiest ever, and they have celebrities to thank for it.

(Via @Hitwise_UK)