CloudFlare sits in front of tens of thousands of websites. In the last month, nearly 5% of the Internet's visitors passed through our network at least once. As a result, we get some sense of what's on these visitors' minds as they search for sites. The news of Osama bin Laden's death last night caused us to investigate what searches people were running that led them to a CloudFlare-powered site. As news began to trickle out on Twitter, the percentage of searches that included the term "Osama" increased.

Before President Obama addressed the world, approximately 1.5% of searches we saw included the word "Osama" as people scoured the web for information. That was up from statistically 0% of searches we see that had included "Osama" over the previous 24-hour period. There was a second peak in search traffic just after President Obama finished speaking. The graph above shows the spike in search traffic for "Osama" as well as the more steady stream of searches for "Obama" over the same period.