Traditional Newspapers Top Edmonton Searches

Heated and ongoing is the debate about how the rise of the Internet as a significant player in the news and information business would affect the audience of traditional media. Shedding more light on the issue is a recently released study by Edmonton-based Epiar Inc. The study showed that when Internet searchers are looking for a particular local site, the most likely type of site they are looking for are the websites of local newspapers.

The basis of the newspaper study involved mining and processing the search frequencies of the top 3,198 searched phrases representing over 8,000,000 searches containing the word “Edmonton”.

2 word co-occurrences
in searches containing the word Edmonton

Although the exact phrase “Edmonton Journal” was the most searched phrase, the total searches using phrases with “Edmonton Journal” in them, like “Edmonton Journal classifieds” represented far less than 5% of the total searches. On the other hand, in a separate analysis of single word occurrences, Epiar found that real estate related searches, represented by the presence of a variety of words including real, estate, realtors, homes, MLS, etc accounted for almost 10% of the total searches. The second largest commercial category was travel related searches followed by various retail and service-related categories.

Epiar collects and analyses search frequency data to provide market research on the relative demand for various products and services, brand equity studies and search engine optimization and marketing data.