Highest traffic keyword on internet?

Try making a guess. What is the highest traffic? No prizes for guessing and if you did not get the word then I must say and with a sense of being sorry for you that you are not even close to being internet literate. The largest driver of traffic on internet in the word sex. I’d also appreciate if you won’t ask like professors as to what is the source of this information and who and when was this cited. I am not trying to make a dumb story and prove a point, but common-sense and logic with slightest of internet literacy would make you approve to this fact.

Enough of dibblying-dobbllying around. I want to you to imagine a number which is close to being the number of domains starting with sex. And this time around I am going to give you close to an exact figure (coz the number keeps increasing by day). Also before I end the suspense I must tell you that this number does not include country level TLDs (Top-leve domains).

The staggering number is 117,493. Again these are all the domains which start with the word sex. The data does not include domains that have sex but not at the beginning of it. How about giving you the proof. Here is the excel sheet as of today (13 March 08) that has all the domains that start with the word sex.

I have password protected the file so as to avoid misuse. Please leave a comment and I’ll email you the password. The excel file is in 2007 format with extension .xlsx. The file can be found here.

Singular or plural high traffic search terms

In an interesting research by a UK based Internet Research company, Hitwise, analyzed the difference between searches for ‘laptop’ and ‘laptops’. Following snapshot suggests how singular and plurals are being used.

Closely look at the usage of high traffic query modifiers like, cheap and free. I am starting to wonder of search engines are (or already have) reduced the relevance of these modifiers.

The company comes with some other interesting insights like singular is more closely used with laptop accessories. They are also making a point that plural terms send more traffic compared to the singular terms. Read the complete story Plural or Singular search terms?