Search Roundup: Inauguration Stats; Ads Without Engines

Searching for inauguration info: Google said technology-related searches like “YouTube live inauguration” and “inaugural podcast” made up fully about a third of all the queries about Obama’s inauguration yesterday — a marked change from 2001 when relatively few inauguration searches even included the word “video.” It’s the latest example of how search, in particular, has impacted the way people seek political information.

More stats: top queries during the inauguration included “live inauguration coverage” and “inauguration day 2009 streaming;” and the overall volume of search queries dropped dramatically from the time Obama took the Oath of Office until the end of his speech (as people halted their Web surfing to watch and listen to the speech).

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Advertisers move search beyond the engines: Search-related ads are increasingly showing up on content sites and other properties, not just core search engines. Pizza Hut is spending more on mobile and social-media search ads now, Monster.com is testing a program tied to iPhone searches, and Universal Pictures is running ads tied to searches like “scary movie” and “horror film” on YouTube, to promote its new movie The Unborn. According to the WSJ, more searches now take place on the video site than on all of Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO).

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