Choose Google reality over Red Top mythology


their door - or affluent and Viagra-chomping, merrily spending the children’s inheritance as they travel the world.


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But according to online data, a very different, more complex and realistic picture emerges of the issues and challenges facing today’s over 50s and how they are reacting to a changing financial and social landscape.


If we start with the two big issues of the day: pensions and retirement and map out searches on Google over the last five years we can see that, firstly, the issue of pensions generates more interest than the more generic term ‘retirement’.


What’s really interesting is the increase in searches for ‘pension age calculator’ and ‘pension forecast’, showing how people are working out exactly what their income will be. Of course, this will partly be a measure of the fact that such tools are available, but it’s interesting to note that people are being proactive, getting online and arming themselves with the information they need. We can see a similar pattern in the searches for nursing and care homes – a classic search made by the baby boomer children of the very elderly and probably not the elderly themselves.


What’s quite interesting here is that ‘nursing home’ and ‘care home’ are by far the most popular terms, but also that ‘care home’ is becoming more popular and searches seem to be growing faster than for ‘nursing’. Perhaps this is because ‘care home’ sounds more comfortable and homely, less institutional and somehow less… final.


Lastly, online data can give us a fascinating perspective on the older population by looking at the searches for ‘grandparents’. If we look at the top and fastest rising searches for ‘grandparents’, ‘grandparents rights’ is the top search and ‘grandparents access rights’ is a ‘breakout’ search, which means it has grown extremely fast.


Whilst on the one hand, this data is a sad indictment of family breakdown, it does show that grandparents are fighting back. After all, nobody would make a search like this unless they were planning to exercise those rights. Like the pensions data, it shows that people are actively looking for information, that they are taking a stand, and becoming, in short, a force to be reckoned with.


Nicholine Hayward, Planning Directorat, Bell Pottinger


ccording to the tabloids, there are only two kinds of over 50’s - either sad and poverty-stricken, cowering in their council flat as yobs rampage outside


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