We've taken a look at news searches after last Tuesday's terrorist attacks on America. Even more than after last year's elections, CNN was nearly synonymous with the Internet news search.
When we ran a similar report last November, and at that point we noted that CNN was by far the most popular news search, with 41.3 percent of searches among the top 20 news organizations. Last week, CNN had an even greater lead in news search -- nearly 44 percent.
Here were the top 20 news organizations searched last week:
43.9% CNN
9.1% BBC News
7.8% ABC News
5.8% NBC News
5.7% MSNBC
4.3% CBS News
4.0% NY Times
3.5% FOX News
2.1% Reuters
2.1% Associated Press
2.0% Sky News
2.0% CBC News
1.6% Washington Post
1.6% USA Today
1.1% CNBC
1.0% National Public Radio
0.7% Radio Canada
0.6% Boston Herald
0.6% Drudge Report
0.5% Boston Globe
How big is CNN? CNN received more searches than the BBC, ABC, CBS, FOX, and all the NBC cable networks combined. Incidentally, 2 percent of CNN searches were for CNN in Espanol. On its own, it would have made the top 20.
Once the whole week was said and done, CNN received 21 times more searches last week than the week before. By comparison, MSNBC received about nine times more searches than the week before, and BBC News received 6.5 times as many searches.
The NBC networks are an interesting story because of the fact that NBC keeps them somewhat separated. If you added the three together, they would stand at 12.6 percent of news searches, higher than everyone else besides CNN.
The international implications of an attack on the World Trade Center led to a rise in international news searches, much more than during the election crisis in November. Two of these organizations are British, and two Canadian. Below the top 20 we also saw searches escalate for the British ITN and London Times, as well as the Canadian CTV and the Israeli Jerusalem Post.
Note that we counted searches for networks (such as CBS and NBC) as searches for the news departments of those networks (CBS News and NBC News), because those searches rose steeply after the terrorist attacks.
TOMORROW: The new Lycos 50.
