According to Hitwise, one of the companies that tracks these sorts of things, is saying in a press release today that searches for the search phrase “global warming” are “heating up”: The number of search queries containing the words ‘global warming’ increased 173 percent year over year — growing from 755 unique terms in the four weeks ending February 18, 2006 to 2,059 unique terms in the four weeks ending February 17, 2007.

According to Hitwise, several recent studies have come out on the topic such as the United Nation’s recent “Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change” study and is causing additional searches for the search phrase, “global warming”. Hitwise is also reporting that “the volume of searches for the search term ‘global warming’ reached an all time high for the four weeks ending February 17, 2007 receiving .010 percent of US searches online — up 213.6 percent compared to the four weeks ending February 18, 2006.”

Here’s more specific data from the Hitwise press release today:

Wikipedia.org received the most traffic from the search term ‘global warming’ for the four weeks ending February 17, 2007, with 14.5 percent of online searches for ‘global warming’ going to that website.

The Environmental Protection Agency (epa.gov) received the second largest volume of search traffic from ‘global warming’ with 12.8 percent followed the ClimateHotMap.org, which received 8 percent of search traffic.

ClimateCrisis.net, the website for the Al Gore movie — “An Inconvenient Truth,” received 2.8 percent of search traffic for ‘global warming’ for the same four week period.

Top Websites That Received Visits from the Term ‘global warming’
For the four weeks ending 2/17/2007

Domain Share (%)
www.wikipedia.org 14.52
www.epa.gov 12.84
www.climatehotmap.org 8.09
fightglobalwarming.com 5.88
www.nrdc.org 5.30
www.ncdc.noaa.gov 4.71
news.google.com 4.38
www.ucsusa.org 2.91
www.climatecrisis.net 2.88
www.myspace.com 2.68

Note that this data is from the Hitwise sample of 10 million US Internet users for the four weeks ending February 17, 2007.