Fort Hood:  How Iraq reacted

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Regional Search Interest in Fort HoodFollowing the shootings on November 5th 2009 at Ford Hood, Texas (one of the largest United States military installations in the world) there have been 18,000 Google searches for ‘Fort Hood’ across the world.

With regards to international news items it is generally more common that the highest searches are carried out from within the country the news originated from. 

In the instance of Fort Hood we would have expected this rule to have been followed, but looking at the data available from Google we can see that the largest amount of queries originated from Iraq.  This may seem strange but, when you consider the current military deployment, it is likely that these searches have been made by military personnel posted in Iraq searching for information about the events back home as news broke.

Google Insights search volumes: Fort Hood vs Wat on the moon

By using social media and real-time information sites, such as Twitter, you can have access to the latest news as it happens.  When an increase in volume is detected, the search engines are always quick to react (as was evident in the case of Jan Moir in the Stephen Gately scandal) enabling users to gain access to relevant, up-to-date information as it becomes available.

When you look at the scale of the news coverage, and the information available, this figure dwarves the number of searches for the Indian space mission which found evidence of water on the moon. This shows just how dependent people are on real-time information and how they use search engines to find this information adding to the growing proof of its necessity in the daily life for people around the globe.

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