Yahoo Search Blog runs a post titled May The Buzz Be With You, highlighting some interesting trends in movie searches.
Taken at its face, it points to pop culture tendencies in consumers, which is certainly interesting in and of itself.
At a more abstract level, it screams “Look at the great marketing data we have!” What do I mean by that?
Back in 1999 I helped start a web based gift registry company (WishClick.com); we built it using a “network” model, where from a central registry, you could add products from all of your favorite online retailers (or at least the 30 we partnered with).
The connection? In addition to collecting a bounty on every gift purchased for you, we also knew your interests across product categories, and tendencies of people buying on your behalf. For a partner like The Sharper Image, we could tell them (in aggregate), the types of books, clothing, cooking gear, etc that their customers were putting on their gift registries, providing them with a much richer perspective of their customer base.
The same is true for Yahoo… and in some ways, in a more significant way than for Google; Yahoo, after all, knows much more about you (at this point) if you’ve registered with them…