FREAKquel: Has 9/11 Diminished Pearl Harbor?

Yesterday, after posting this item wondering whether 9/11 had begun to diminish our collective remembrance of Pearl Harbor Day, I wrote to Bill Tancer of Hitwise.com. I asked Bill to take a look at his search-query data for any insights into this subject. Here’s his reply:

Unfortunately, I only have access to 24 mo. of historical data. However, the question is fascinating so I charted the volume of searches in the U.S. for the two terms “pearl harbor” and “9/11”:

Using our search term analysis, I can analyze where people go when they search on the term “pearl harbor” listed below (for week ending 12/07/2006):

I also decided to check out that spike in “9/11” that happened this September.

So to answer your question, with the exception of the week of 9/11, “pearl harbor” searches continue to exceed “9/11” queries.

I am a bit surprised by this, and am guessing that if we included searches for “september 11” and “world trade center” along with “9/11,” the story might be different. I am even more surprised that Wikipedia got more 9/11 traffic than CNN.com, BBC.com, and Time.com combined.

Thanks, Bill.