Watching Searches by Content Fleet Seen Saving Newspapers: Tech
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Sixteen hours before Whitney Houston was pronounced dead on Feb. 11, a startup in Hamburg noticed a surge in Web traffic about the American singer after she had been seen drunk and arguing in a Hollywood club. The data analysis company, Content Fleet GmbH, knew Houston would dominate headlines the next day.
Content Fleet has created software that constantly monitors 5 million subjects on some 600,000 websites. It registered a sharp increase in Google searches, Facebook mentions and Twitter posts about Houston. After comparing the volume of traffic to previous peaks and checking how much coverage the story had already received, Content Fleet knew that articles on Houston would draw readers.