Whilst this season of " Downton Abbey " brought on fevers throughout the Abbey in the form of the Spanish Flu, the US has been rocked by a severe case of "Downton" fever. Interest in the program has grown by over 1400% during season two versus last year's season one airing )defined by volume of searches YoY(. Not only are people searching for a higher volume of searches for variations of "Downton",

Despite the results of the Iowa caucus and South Carolina primary , if you look at Facebook, Mitt Romney is ahead by a huge margin. Total visits to the Facebook pages of the presidential candidates highlights the growth to Mitt Romney's Facebook page over the past few weeks, visits have jumped 248% last week as compared to the week ending Dec, 24, 2011. In comparison, the volume of total visits to Mitt Romney's Facebook page was 1.7x that of Ron Paul's page and 2.

Thanksgiving is only a few days away and aspiring chefs are hungrily searching online for holiday recipes. Searches for Thanksgiving and turkey recipes traditionally peak the week of Thanksgiving, indicating that recipe searchers procrastinate and wait until the last minute before planning their feast. Traffic during the 2011 holiday season shows that searches on "Thanksgiving .

Black Friday is almost upon us and the outlook is looking good for a positive start to the holiday season. The NRF predicts that 152 million people will shop over Black Friday weekend, up 10% from last year - a conservative estimate based upon the actual 212 million shoppers that actually appeared in retail stores. .

As the Occupy movement passed its two month anniversary last week, Occupy-related sites )e.g occupywallstreet.org ( experienced a resurgence in market share of visits. The initial peak in searches for variations of "occupy" and traffic to Occupy-related sites occurred in the first two weeks of October, as web-users sought general information about Occupy protests, the movement's demands and associated celebrities.

As the 2012 automotive models continue to roll out throughout 2011, consumers in the market for a new vehicle are increasingly searching online for automotive makes and models. Online users have increased their share of overall vehicle make and model searches by 37% for the 4 weeks sending October 8, 2011 as compared to the same time frame 2 years ago.

On October 4th 2011 Apple announced the addition of the iPhone 4S to its product line which will be available to customers on October 12th. This was likely to the dismay of web users who have been anxiously awaiting Apple to announce that it would be releasing the iPhone 5 instead of an upgrade to the current iPhone. In advance of this much-anticipated announcement,

ABC's Bachelor franchise, which consists of The Bachelor , The Bachelorette , and Bachelor Pad , has become a popular topic in gossip magazines, news & entertainment shows and on various websites. Web traffic data from Hitwise shows that in the 12 rolling weeks ending August 20th, three of the top ten search terms driving traffic to ABC.go.com included variations of "the bachelorette" which coincided with the most recent season. Traffic to ABC.go.

As was widely reported on August 16th, retailer Abercrombie & Fitch announced that it would pay Mike "The Situation" Sorrentino and the rest of the Jersey Shore cast to not wear its brand of clothing citing the association as "distressing" to fans of the clothing line. Hitwise data shows that this announcement appears to have strengthened the connection between Abercrombie & Fitch and the cast of Jersey Shore. In fact,

Ongoing debates in Washington DC regarding the debt ceiling have captured the interest of Americans as many struggle to understand the overall impact. Search activity has been building over the past 5 weeks and variations of 'debt ceiling' jumped 232% for the week ending July 16, 2011 as compared to the prior week. Last week, 'debt ceiling' ranked first among all search variations including the keyword 'debt'.

While some Americans learned the news Sunday night via Twitter or the announcement from President Obama, curiosity and questions continued well into Monday. The daily visits to News & Media websites reached a three year high for the second time this year on Monday, May 2, 2011 following the announcement of the death of Osama Bin Laden. The previous peak was on March 11, 2011 from the news of the devastating earthquake and tsunami in Japan. Yahoo!

An ABC News/ Washington Post "general-election trial heat" poll released on Tuesday, June 7th indicated that President Obama and former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney are currently neck and neck among respondents. If the contest for the White House between these two men alone, currently 47% of those polled would vote for Mr. Romney and 47% would vote for Mr. Obama. Romney was the top performing candidate against Obama among Jon Huntsman, Newt Gingrich, Tim Pawlenty,

Last Thursday, General Mills became the first large consumer packaged goods company to offer a deal on a daily deals site. The company's promotion on Groupon gave consumers in Minneapolis and San Francisco the opportunity to receive more than $40 of General Mills products )e.g. Cinnamon Toast Crunch( and a $15 coupon book for the price of $20 - General Mills will ship the goods directly to the shoppers' homes. The deal had sold out by about 11am in both markets.

The Guardian and The Independent are at loggerheads over whether Americans are bored with the Royal Wedding or utterly enthralled. But which newspaper is on the mark? Judging by Experian Hitwise search data, it seems that neither is quite right. It's no surprise to see that web-users in the UK are performing more than twice as many searches about Kate Middleton, Prince William and the Royal Wedding as the next closest markets, Canada & New Zealand.

Following the announcement of the end of Glenn Beck's Fox News program , there has been discussion of the impact of Beck's declining ratings on the decision . Indeed, ratings for The Glenn Beck Program fell to an average of 1.9mm in January 2011 from their 2.8mm peak in January 2009. Although ratings for The Glenn Beck Program have slid,

With the start of the protests and demonstrations in Egypt, visits to the English Al Jazeera website have increased as many in the US turned to the Middle Eastern news source for coverage. The volume of visits increased 6x on January 28, 2011 as compared to the previous day and as of February 15th, remain 125% higher than a month ago as anti-government demonstrations continue in other areas of the region. The news of the resignation of Hosni Mubarak,

Once again, the Internet provides the opportunity to make dreams come true, or at least get a viral campaign off the ground quickly. Despite the mayor shooting down the idea to build a statue of RoboCop )from the 1987 movie( in Detroit via Twitter on Feb 7th, a group of fans decided to begin raising awareness and funds anyway through a Facebook page and a website called Detroit Needs RoboCop . Now the idea is actually coming to life after the group received over 1,

Whenever I start to see friends posting about joining a new website on Facebook or Twitter , I always begin to monitor the traffic patterns to for more widespread adoption. One good example is Quora.com , a much-talked about crowd sourced question and answer website, where visits have been steadily growing since the public launch in June 2010.

No matter what teams are playing, every Super Bowl party needs to have good snacks to eat while watching the game. Last week as football )and ad( fans got their planning underway, search clicks on a portfolio of search terms for Super Bowl recipes increased 239%, as compared to the previous week. The ratio of paid clicks also increased along with demand to represent 24% of the total.

Time to set the alarm clocks for 4am - Black Friday is almost here! Holiday shoppers are already researching the Black Friday promotions with searches around Black Friday up 31% and the share of visits to Black Friday websites up 18% last week over the week before Thanksgiving and Black Friday last year. The top 5 websites captured 81% of all visits to the custom category of Black Friday websites and traffic to Black-Friday.net and BlackFriday.