Looming Election Has Australians Searching For Answers

Top Searches for Kevin Rudd and John Howard uncovered.

MELBOURNE – May 24, 2007 – According to Hitwise, the leading online competitive intelligence service, the Australian public have been turning to search engines to uncover information on John Howard and Kevin Rudd, their policies and a variety of personal information and beliefs of the two candidates.

In the past four rolling weeks ending 20/5/07, there were approximately 572 different search variations containing 'kevin rudd' and 1,437 containing the terms 'john howard'.
 
Some of the most popular searches containing the terms 'john howard' and 'kevin rudd' were:

The Hitwise Politics category lists sites which belong to particular political parties or organisations, plus sites that are devoted to expressing views on local or international political issues. The most popular political website visited by Australian Internet users recently was not actually Australian based.  The website www.truthlaidbear.com is a political ezine that covers a range of topics from democracy to web publishing trends.

The second and third most-visited political websites visited by Australian Internet users On Line Opinion (www.onlineopinion.com.au) and GetUp! (www.getup.org.au) are Australian-based websites constantly jostling for second position. Over the past week, Australian Internet users visited over 860 different political websites; however only 115 (28.2%) of these websites were Australian based sites. Further analysis shows that the majority of users visiting political websites in Australia are women (56%).

Painting the picture in relation to just how popular Australian political websites are in in this country, Hitwise found that the average time spent  by Australians on political websites is less than half that of the average time spent on all other types of websites. Australians also spent significantly less time on political websites in comparison to US and UK Internet users recently.

US
The average session duration for the Lifestyle - Politics category during the week ending 19/05/07 was 6 minutes, 57 seconds which represents an increase of 13 seconds compared to the previous week.

UK
The average session duration for the Lifestyle - Politics category during the week ending 19/05/07 was 5 minutes, 4 seconds which represents a decrease of 16 seconds compared to the previous week.

AUS
The average session duration for the Lifestyle - Politics category during the week ending 19/05/07 was 4 minutes, 46 seconds which represents a decrease of 26 seconds compared to the previous week.

Australian politics websites made up around 0.11% of Australian Internet use last week.  To put this into perspective, the popularity of politics websites can be likened to websites in the following categories: Cricket, Motorcycling, Book Publishers and Hobbies & Craft.

Below are a list of the Top 20 Politics websites visited by Australian Internet users last week ranked by visits.

About Hitwise

Hitwise is the leading online competitive intelligence service. Only Hitwise provides its 1,200 global clients with daily insights on how their customers interact with a broad range of competitive websites, and how their competitors use different tactics to attract online customers.

Since 1997, Hitwise has pioneered a unique, network-based approach to Internet measurement. Through relationships with ISPs around the world, Hitwise’s patented methodology captures the anonymous online usage, search, and conversion behavior of 25 million Internet users. This unprecedented volume of Internet usage data is seamlessly integrated into our easy to use, web-based service, designed to help marketers better plan, implement, and report on a range of online marketing programs.

Hitwise is a privately held company headquartered in New York City and operates in the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, and Singapore. More information about Hitwise is available at www.hitwise.com.

For up to date analysis of online trends and statistics, please visit the Hitwise Intelligence Analyst Weblogs at weblogs.hitwise.com and the Hitwise Data Center at www.hitwise.com/datacenter.