Sir Patrick Stewart sparks Google interest

The British monarch's new year honours usually bring a flurry of interest in the people whose names appear among the great and the good, but the 2010 list sent interest in Shakespearean actor and Star Trek star Sir Patrick Stewart into the stratosphere.

Google’s search trends reported a massive spike in queries relating to the star when news of his knighthood broke. Between 3pm and 9pm on December 30, search volumes for ‘Patrick Stewart knighted’ took off massively.

The Google chart (above) shows numbers for Sir Patrick are consistently high, but by 9pm on December 30, he had risen into the top 20 most searched terms, and although the figures fell back later, he remained in the top 30 until 11pm BST.

Neil Yeomans, Lakestar Media’s head of SEO , who picked up on the movement, said he had never seen such a dramatic rise in popularity for a single search term.