What do people search for on Twitter? We collected search terms that we took place within Twitter’s search engine to identify the topics that are being searched most often on Twitter for the week ending March 21, 2009. Searches for the vampire series ‘twilight’ were the most popular for the week overall fueled by the US release of the DVD, followed by ‘redco’, and ‘parkersburg’.

Among the top 75 search terms on search.twitter.com, entertainment-related ones were among the most popular and represented 29% of the share of searches. Celebrity personalities were the biggest sub-category within Entertainment being searched, with Paris Hilton and Oprah Winfrey topping the list. Jeremy Davies ranked 3rd along with his character Daniel Faraday from ABC’s Lost at #4. John Mayer rounded out the top 5, not surprisingly the same week that his Twitter habits were implicated in the break-up with Jennifer Aniston. The most popular television shows being searched for the week on Twitter’s search were NBC's The Biggest Loser, NBC's Saturday Night Live, and The SciFi Network's Battlestar Galactica (#BSG).

Politics and searches for individual people’s names followed Entertainment with 12% and 10% of the share of searches, respectively. The top political personalities being searched for the week were 'obama' and 'john mccain'.

Some unique and fun topics that are being searched on Twitter are the ones that are associated with the ‘nifty queries’ that are listed along the right side of the search engine results page for Twitter, along with the broad discussion topics that take place (e.g. spring). For the week ending March 21, 2009, within the top 75 search terms, searchers were looking for ‘love or hate’, ‘soulmates’ and ‘cool filter:links’. Daily quiz Blogthings and Swag Codes contests are also popular activities that take place on Twitter, resulting in searches. Cocktails were also top of mind with ‘martini’ and ‘g&t’ being searched.

Heather Dougherty

Heather Dougherty is Director, Research at Hitwise. This piece originally appeared on Hitwise's analyst blog here.

Image by Arthur Lee Smokes