Confused by recent financial news? Well, me too. Turn to CNN, Bloomberg News, CNBC, take your pick and dreary eyed journalists inch us closer to a recession every doom and gloom word they speak. Now even your grandma is worried about the credit crunch and is packing baked beans and shotgun ammo in the basement. Cut to a commercial selling derivative annuities and 30 seconds later you’re told Visa (V) and MasterCard (MA) are beating all profit expectations. This world just doesn’t make sense. Let see if our research pulls up any enticing insight.

So what does everyone do when their bank account runs red? Start saving? No silly, credit of course. There’s a reason why Visa and MasterCard execs receive 10 figure bonuses. They’ve successfully marketed everyone into thinking they need a credit card. The term, credit card and credit cards, tops our list with over 17,000 cumulative searches a day. Not all, but I suspect most are researching how they plan to pay for their next vacation, plasma screen TV or LV clutch. So while your neighbour’s mortgage is defaulting, the simple pleasures of urban glitter never escape your reach. But hang on.

What else does our research tell us? Surprise, the 4th highest search are people looking up queries related to bad credit. That tells a lot about our current financial situation doesn’t it. Somebody tell the Department of Education our high school finance class skipped this module. Hang on, that class doesn’t even exist.

No child left behind? No child left without credit is today’s slogan.

Epiar is an Edmonton-based internet market research and search engine optimization company. Please contact us for more information or to commission your own research reports.

Summer is just around the corner and when company’s coming you can expect cold beer and hot flames shooting out your trusty backyard grill. But while you put off refinishing your cracked cedar deck another year, you might also be considering what your next BBQ feast should entail. Timeless cookbooks and, now, the Internet might help tantalize those taste buds. Let’s examine what your amateur chef counterparts are searching.

As you could have guessed, the staples of outdoor cookouts topped the list. Chicken, ribs, pork and BBQ sauces are first to sear atop those red hot bricks of charcoal. Unfortunately for our vegetarians, no specific mentions of vegetable recipes made our list. While our top search of ‘BBQ Recipes’ must surely include some non-meat alternatives, it’s safe to say Babe and his compatriots might not enjoy this season as much as the rest of us.
 
If your curiosity for the Q hasn’t been satisfied, let’s take a look at some more interesting items that made our research.

• Graveyard BBQ, 53 daily searches
• Apparently, a dirtcore band featured in the first release of Guitar Hero.
• Dinosaur BBQ, 17
• A hard edged American restaurant chain accompanied by “genuine houserockin’, footstompin’ music…” at least according to their website. Serving up T-Rex sized portions.
• Aussie BBQ, 13
• Australians’ are not to be outdone when skewering wild game ala Crocodile Dundee
• Jack Daniels BBQ, 10
• Ribs infused with Tennessee whiskey can only enhance Saturday afternoons.

Epiar is an Edmonton-based internet market research and search engine optimization company. Please contact us for more information or to commission your own research reports.

We've all heard about return on investment (ROI) as well as search frequency research. But what happens when we combine the two to see which of the 2008 US Presidential candidates have the highest levels of public interest (as measured by the number of online searches for each candidate's name) compared to each campaign's expenditures? Do we arrive at a rudimentary form of a Presidential campaign ROI?

Early estimates indicate that, while Ron Paul and Hillary Clinton share a similar number of daily online searches, the amount of money they have spent differs wildly. Big spenders Mitt Romney and Barack Obama have yet to capture the curiousity of online citizens despite already spending tens of millions of dollars. Alternately, small spenders Mike Huckabee and Dennis Kucinich have disproportionately high levels of public interest compared to their undersized budgets. Perhaps the over-achieving campaigns of Huckabee, Kucinich, and Paul are a good early indicator of identifying this election's most potent dark horse candidates?

While charting the online searches for a candidate may not be the most important metric for predicting the outcome of the 2008 Presidential election, I sure would not be happy if my campaign showed an imbalanced ROI like Romney, McCain, or Giuliani!

Epiar is an Edmonton-based internet market research and search engine optimization company. Please contact us for more information or to commission your own research reports.

People are willing to try the strangest diets to shed a few pounds. Why not just eat less junk food and move more often? Regardless, not even one of the top 10 fad diets is appealing enough to make me want to try it!

Perhaps to improve their beach appeal, people are searching for “South Beach Diet” and “Atkins Diet” over 2000 times each per day. Still, “Diet Pills” remain today’s most popular online diet topic, with over 2800 searches per day for those easy-to-swallow exercise replacements. Additional diets I'd rather not try (but apparently others do) include the “Mediterranean Diet”, the “Mayo Clinic Diet”, and the “Grapefruit Diet”.

While the effectiveness of fad diets are doubted by many, few would question the unhealthiness of several diets that did not make the top 10 list: “Chocolate Diet” (28 searches per day), “Water Diet” (59), “Barf Diet” (81), and “Crash Diets” (44). 

To see a sampling of the raw phrases used to create this list, check out these fad diet search phrases.

Epiar is an Edmonton-based internet market research and search engine optimization company. Please contact us for more information or to commission your own research reports.

While in the midst of doing research on various projects, the most unexpected phrases keep popping up in our keyword lists – phrases that real people in presumably real situations obviously feel compelled to enter into search engines.

These phrases are bizarre enough on their own, but what really makes me shake my head and wonder is imagining the situations these poor, unfortunate, confused people must find themselves in the first place…

Bizarre Phrases that People Actually Type into Search Engines:

• My english teacher lost my essay (searched 18 times per day)
• Whole body donation (22)
• Shaving horse (27)
• Cow seeds (6)
• Underground soil (3)
• Natural dog (64)
• Husband doesn’t shower or wear deodorant (5)
• My husband wears my clothes (10)
• Why is my husband a jerk (6)
• How to flirt (179)
• Why is my honda goldwing to hard to push (15)
• Holiday meal with no teeth (4)

Epiar Inc. is an Edmonton-based internet market research and search engine optimization company. Please contact us for more information or to commission your own research reports.