Among news sites “breaking news” is a sought-after keyword phrase; I see it prominently placed in home page title tags all the time:
And it’s not just general news sites. “Breaking news” is featured in the title tags of sites covering sports, entertainment and a wide range of topics.
Seeing this term targeted so often got me wondering, does anyone actually search for “breaking news”?
If I’m looking for breaking news on a particular topic I’ll search with queries using that topic, for example “Air France crash” or “Sonia Sotomayor Supreme Court.”
And if I want to get an overview of the current news of the day I’ll go to Google News or Yahoo! News or direct navigate to a major news site. But I don’t think I’d ever simply type “breaking news” into a search engine.
However according to the Google Adwords Keyword Tool some people do:
Currently CNN.com and MSNBC.com are the top two listings in Google for “breaking news.” It would be interesting to learn how much search engine traffic they are getting from that specific term.
Leave a Reply