The recent release of the sequel to Peter Molyneux’s original Fable video game, Fable 2, has led to a flurry of uncommon searches on Google. Fable 2allows players to create their own characters. Using this, players can decide whether they want their character to be cruel or kind, a hero or a villain, rich or poor, and also its gender - male or female. This has led to players making all kinds of searches on Google related to the game. The Google hot trend report, which indicates one hundred of the most popular searches, includes a number of searches related to Fable 2.

The game had as many as four key phrases among Google’s hottest trends by October 23, 2008 and players added more key phrases as they looked to the Internet for ways to overcome obstacles in the game.

The sudden increase in searches for key phrases can be a problem for Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and online marketing. With shoppers looking for games online, retailers of games bid on game titles in order to be linked with pay-per-click (PPC) advertisements. Combining advertisement quality and bid amount, Google’s pay-per-click (PPC) system ascertains how an advertisement ranks. The clickthrough ratio or CTR is the key indicator of the quality of the advertisement. This is why the kinds of searches players of Fable 2 are keying in is causing those who have the game, to significantly reduce the CTR for Fable 2 advertisements.