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Heath Ledger's death in New York two days ago caused one of the biggest internet frenzies ever, with news websites and search engines experiencing huge traffic spikes.
The news led to the third-highest day of traffic ever for nzherald.co.nz and came on the back of a strong week, with news about Sir Edmund Hillary's funeral and the fluctuations in world stockmarkets dominating the headlines.
On Tuesday, coverage of Sir Ed's death led to the site's second-highest day of traffic ever. Only the All Blacks' loss to France at last year's Rugby World Cup led to a higher number of page views.
Within half an hour of breaking the news of Ledger's death, nzherald.co.nz traffic jumped dramatically.
The story had the second-highest number of hits ever in its first hour on the site, second only to the news of that infamous rugby match last October.
The trend was reflected across the globe, with news sites in Ledger's home country of Australia likening the spikes to those experienced following the shock death of Steve Irwin in 2006.
The Sydney Morning Herald's website reported that unique browsers visiting its website rose almost 250 per cent compared with Tuesday's figures and page impressions jumped a staggering 60 per cent.
Melbourne's theage.com.au also recorded much greater than usual traffic and more than 60 per cent of the traffic on both news sites was from visitors viewing stories or photo galleries of the 28-year-old actor.
The news also caused a sudden jump in searches relating to Heath Ledger.
On nzherald.co.nz there was a 71 per cent increase in search engine referrals, with Heath Ledger related searches making up five of the top 10 searches.
Yahoo reported that four of the fastest moving searches on its Buzz index were related to the actor and searches on the name "Heath Ledger" rocketed a staggering 110,285 per cent.
"A solid 62 per cent of those searches came from women, and the biggest search traffic came from New York, Arizona, and California," Yahoo said.
Similarly, Google's "Hot Trends" list of the 100 fastest rising searches for January 22 contained 25 refering to Ledger, seven of which were in the top 10.
Misspellings of the actor's name were prevalent in the Google list, with entries recorded for "Keith Ledger", "Keith Fletcher", Keith Legend" and Heath Fletcher".
Searches for Ledger's movies and the names of his former partner (Michelle Williams) and daughter (Matilda) were also popular, as was the New York city street address where he was found dead (421 Broome Street).
However a quick look at today's "Hot Trends" list shows how fickle the public can be in its consumption of news.
Searches on the actor have almost completely dropped off the top 100 list, with only one direct reference to the actor in position 31.
That search is: "John Gibson Heath Ledger" and takes people to stories about a Fox News talk show host who has been taken to task for offensive comments he made about the actor's death.
