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The 7 Ways That People Search the Web
Posted by
Zonk
on Mon Aug 14, 2006 01:47 PM
from the seven-stages-of-search dept.
from the seven-stages-of-search dept.
SpaceAdmiral writes "After the recent release of AOL search logs, Paul Boutin used the site splunkd.com to analyse the logs. His analysis groups searchers into seven categories: The Pornhound, the Manhunter, the Shopper, the Obsessive, the Omnivore, the Newbie, and the Basketcase. My favorite example search is in the Basketcase category: 'i hurt when i think too much i love roadtrips i hate my weight i fear being alone for the rest of my life.'"
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Your Rights Online: AOL Releases Search Logs of 657,427 Users 346 comments
An anonymous reader writes "AOL has released the search logs of over 650,000 users for research purposes. This looks like it may become a public relations disaster for AOL, as well as a privacy nightmare for the users involved as Michael Arrington of TechCrunch notes: "AOL has released very private data about its users without their permission. While the AOL username has been changed to a random ID number, the ability to analyze all searches by a single user will often lead people to easily determine who the user is, and what they are up to. The data includes personal names, addresses, social security numbers and everything else someone might type into a search box." This is also being covered on The Paradigm Shift and Oh My News."
fantomas adds " Looks like they've just taken it down but it's still available on The Pirate Bay; not sure why but some of the academic researchers are going crazy musing the ethical aspects of letting the world know who's searching for how to kill their wives ..."
Update: 08/07 21:32 GMT by T : amromousa writes "AOL is now apologizing for the release ..., calling it a "screw-up," which they're upset and angry about."
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The 7 Ways That People Search the Web
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They missed out the Googler (Score:1, Insightful)
(http://alien.dowling.edu/~rohit/wiki)
Re:They missed out the Googler (Score:4, Interesting)
The Newbie.
They just figured out how to turn on the computer. User No. 12792510 is one of many who confuses AOL's search box with its browser address window--he keeps seaching for "www.google." Other AOLers type their searches without spaces between the words ("newcaddillacdeville") as if they were 1990s-era AOL keywords.
Re:They missed out the Googler (Score:4, Insightful)
I have absolutely no clue as to how the parent post deserves '+5 Insightful', I just guess there's enough people out there that *want* to believe anything bad said about AOL.
Moo (Score:5, Funny)
(http://tkatch.com/ | Last Journal: Monday October 29, @02:09PM)
The First Poster - Although this phenominon has been addressed and has somewhat lessened, there are still echoes of "First Post". These people wait on a "Mysterious Furure" story as post stupidities just to get in first.
The Fisher - These posters, rarely named Bobby, check-in with a kingly posts to generate replies and nothing more. Their posts, perhaps at first, seem to make sense, but on closer review contain mnay misstakes, intentionally designed to garner replies.
The old-timer - These posters, who hang around slashdot land, have forgotten to move on. They post just to show off their low slashdot id. This makes some druel, and others comment that low id does not mean more intelligent. However, they're all wrong anyway.
The reposter - Reposters wait for old stories to come up again and find modded-up comments from the old stories to repost. If this is the first time such a story is up, they post a bunch of old buzzwords that realign synergistic paradigm shifts.
The soap stander - Soap-Standers have what to say, and don't care where they say it, such as about why Bush is beery good, and that the UN and its anonymous leader are drunkards, and no amount of coffee will help.
The idiot - Idiots can't count, post moronic comments, and quickly type in useless garbage to fill in a little more space.
One, two, three, four, five, six. (Score:4, Interesting)
You forgot number seven. Should it be a troll? Or perhaps you forgot Poland?
Beyond your ability to count, the article seems quite interesting. My PhD supervisor made an intesresting comment about Google the other day: he said that people at Google must have very interesting information concerning the trends of "common knowledge," this is, before September, 11, 2001 a Google search for "september wtc" would yield totally different results, which surely will show the most "common" of things that people was searching for.
Likewise, if you searched for "Katrina" in Google before August 2005, you maybe ended in the page of someone named like that.
These are basic examples of informaiton that can be obtained with the "time" factor of the Google logs. Remember that time gives another dimension to your data, which lets you extract more information from it. Something among tht lines of image-pattern recognition, it is easier to match patterns from a moving image than from a static image.
Re:One, two, three, four, five, six. (Score:5, Funny)
I believe he was purposefully putting himself in the 'idiot' category for comedic value.
Perhaps the 7th category is for people who miss the joke?:)
Re:Moo (Score:5, Funny)
(http://robvincent.net/ | Last Journal: Tuesday October 09, @01:55PM)
Re:Moo (Score:4, Funny)
(Last Journal: Tuesday June 06 2006, @01:50PM)
Re:Moo (Score:5, Funny)
(http://127.0.0.1/ | Last Journal: Thursday February 03 2005, @06:09PM)
Thats me, and I think your wrong about being wrong.
So what? (Score:1)
On that note (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://pio.longstair.com/)
Other options? (Score:2)
(http://offthegrid.1337hax0r.com/ | Last Journal: Wednesday October 18 2006, @12:56PM)
Where does Cowboy Neal fit into the 7?
Are politicians their own category, or are they basketcases, or Pornhounds?
The Truth is out There (Score:3, Interesting)
So was Neo a manhunter, an obsessive, or just an omnivore?
Re:The Truth is out There (Score:4, Funny)
Categories (Score:2, Funny)
Just a note on the Obsessive (Score:5, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Friday November 10 2006, @02:16PM)
For some reason I stubbornly don't use bookmarks often (as when you have too many, they quickly become worthless) so that obscure search term might be in my profile 300 times over the course of a year if it's a site that I visit daily from the office.
Then again, I post on Slashdot a ton... I'm sure it's pretty obsessive anyway.
They're all just people (Score:5, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Wednesday November 07, @10:09AM)
Ok, a lot of this AOL search data is quite amusing, in a sad, pathetic way. Too many people are having their jollies over it, while secretly being scared someone's going to get a peek at their searching record when Google finally loses its mind and makes the data available. It's easy to laugh, and be downright frightened, but in the end, we type our searches in, click the button and don't give it another thought. People wish to judge (myself included); it was a survival instinct in a far distant past and now it manifests itself as a morbid curiosity with the lives of other people.
People come in all colors, size, and mental states, AOL users undoubtedly more so. SO in their you'll find your fair share of freaks or freak wannabes, but mostly you'll just find people trying to find out things. What makes them freakish is not what they type in, but what they do with the information.
The 8th way (Score:3, Funny)
So AOL is ...... The Breakfast Club??? (Score:5, Funny)
Probably most people on this board are too young to remember anyway....
Re:So AOL is ...... The Breakfast Club??? (Score:4, Funny)
(http://www.chemicalwonderland.net/ | Last Journal: Monday September 03, @10:34PM)
Nope those of us too young to have seen it in the theater have definitely seen it on video, many times.
In fact the movie gives rise to the unofficial Slashdot slogan:
Slashdot: Demented and sad, but social.
nice splunk spam (Score:2, Flamebait)
This is Fascinating, But ... (Score:3, Insightful)
(http://www.grabbingsand.com/)
Uh-oh (Score:1, Funny)
69 927 3d molestation and rape porn 2006-05-20 17:20:16 9 http://slashdot.org/ [slashdot.org]
Now we know why this site is so popular.
Very interesting... (Score:3, Interesting)
(http://www.zombo.com/)
I wonder if a similar Google sample would show different results or identify other archetypes?
I definitly fall into the "Omnivore" type. I would imagine most Slashdotters do.
Actually, maybe the Basket Case one is a better fit for most Slashdotters.
Why TIA is a bad idea (Score:5, Insightful)
That, right there, tells you why we need to worry about "Uncle Sam" having access to *everyone's* search logs - search terms alone contain an implicit picture of what should be some of the most private aspects of your life. Now imagine if user number 672368 turns out to be, say, John McCain's daughter, and Karl Rove got his hands on this just before the Republican presidential primaries...
what do you think would happen? what do you think http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_McCarthy [wikipedia.org]Joe McCarthy could have done with this kind of data? Write to your elected official and ask them these questions, and what safeguards they are putting in place to prevent any such abuse - and tell them you will be voting this fall. Then call your local news channel, and ask them to run a story on it, and ask the candidates for comment. The big networks won't start a story like this, but if a small station is lucky enough to get a clip of a politician stumbling over an answer, it'll be syndicated faster than you can say "feeding frenzy".
(and for those of you naive enough to think that Karl Rove doesn't have access to the equivalent government databases through some back-room contact or another, I have a bridge you might be interested in buying...)
Re:Why TIA is a bad idea (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://ewhac.best.vwh.net/ | Last Journal: Saturday August 18 2001, @10:28PM)
Uh, no.
If you push the "mainstream media" (which is a profit-seeking sensationalism machine) to run with this, the story will not be, "The Government can spy on the most intimate details of your life." Rather, it will be, "Searching for The Searcher: Hunt for Abortion-Seeker Grips Nation." Unholy amounts of money and media resources will be devoted, not to checking Government excesses and lawlessness and preserving the integrity of the Republic, but instead to trying to determine the identity of this mysterious woman, abandoned by a lothario, and left to agonize over the moral quandary of leading an exemplary Christian life (whatever that might mean) and terminating a pregnancy she knows she can't handle. The media circus around this story would make the stories surrounding Terri Schiavo look like a 30-second Public Service Announcement.
Face it: It's the perfect American "news" soap opera. And it also has the beauty of urgency: "Can she be found before she has the abortion?" (Never mind the fact these search queries are fairly old.)
So, no. You don't want to push this in front of CNN. They will spin it completely the wrong way. Why? Because that's what'll make them the most money. And the poor unfortunate woman in the middle of all this will be totally fucked. Again.
Schwab
Now.. (Score:2)
Example : Obsessive Pornhounds(typical behaviour: spends inordinate times in usenet, loves tenta..)
or Manhunter Shopper(typical behaviour : posts on craiglists under 10 different profiles, e/n queen at somethingcrappy or somethinsomething)
or perhaps Newbie Basketcase (typical behaviour: reloads
or heck maybe Newbie Pornhounds or Basketcase Omnivore..
Purely in the name of research of course.
Seven Dirty Searches (Score:2, Funny)
(http://klenwell.net/ | Last Journal: Thursday February 08 2007, @12:41PM)
In a way, it sort of is.
Assumptions (Score:5, Insightful)
The article is an interesting read but I'm not buying into his category system.
Slashdotted (Score:2)
(http://www.wou.edu/~spowell)
The porn site has now been slashdotted.
Get off my born, bitches!
Not "obsessive", but lazy (Score:2, Insightful)
For me, I will goggle words that I know that will contain links that I want to see, but never remember to bookmark. It's much easier to just go to a search engine and type a keyword and scroll for the link in the first 10 hits, rather than go through your hundreds of bookmarks to find exactly the one you're looking for.
I bet I'm a basketcase (Score:1, Offtopic)
(Last Journal: Thursday April 28 2005, @06:02PM)
Finally found the pref to kill that but it was annoying as hell.
Was it strategic ? (Score:2, Insightful)
If you analyze the search data you'll know that video market is growing rapidly. Search engines are surely driven by porn market. It explains why google was fighting for that data. It could have bought down their revenue. As search engines are useful for the development of internet, user data is useful for the development of future product because you know in advance who are the potential customers for the new product.
2281868 is the winner... (Score:5, Funny)
Basketcase (Score:2)
Is it good news or bad news.... (Score:5, Funny)
(http://picknit.com/ | Last Journal: Saturday July 29 2006, @03:58PM)
Re:Is it good news or bad news.... (Score:5, Funny)
Or at least they don't use AOL searches to find it.
Best. Search history. Ever. (Score:5, Funny)
Big news... (Score:5, Insightful)
The analysis denotes an astoundingly low level of understanding of how people actually use the web. What the author is seeing is absolutely normal and obvious. The only abnormal thing is his surprise.
The Pornhound. The fact that people search for porn on the web must rank as the discovery of the year!
The Manhunter. Who ever bookmarks other people's web pages? I just type the people's names in Google, and most people I know do just that. We are all manhunters I guess.
The Shopper. Same as above, who uses bookmarks? If I am interested in a treo 700 and I type it 37 times in 3 days, this just means that I find it more convenient to type treo 700, then select from the search results, that bookmark the result pages that I am interested in. And this is reasonable: why should I create bookmarks that become useless once I do buy the treo?
The Obsessive. See above. People that search often for A are simply people who don't bother creating a bookmark for some results about A. Big discovery.
The Omnivore. Ok, so when the pattern is complex, the author gives up. This is a really informative category.
The Newbie. Again, it must rank as one of the big discoveries of the year that there are newbies on AOL...
The Basket Case. This seems to be a repeat of "the omnivore", except that the author found these queries weirder.
Who posted this on Slashdot? It's not interesting research at all! It's junk!
We have a winner (Score:1)
The Pirate (Score:5, Interesting)
While the pr0n crowd gets its own category, it would seem those who use the Internet to illicitly acquire copyrighted materials would simply fall into a subcategory of the Obsessive, and not an important enough one to be mentioned in the article. What of those brave souls who search for cracks, keygens, nocd patches, torrents, dvd rippers, and the like? Are they less prevalant than some would have us believe, or perhaps because AOL appeals to a less tech-savvy demographic, its searches might underrepresent them.
Omnivore subcategory: ouch! (Score:3, Interesting)
(http://tumbleweed.smugmug.com/)
I use IMDb as much as I use Google. A merging of those two would be quite convenient for me.
Oh, and let's throw in Wikipedia while we're at it. While it may not be as accurate as a paper-published encyclopedia, it's still a zillion times more accurate than the average one-off webpage you're likely to find on any given topic.
Self-selection (Score:4, Interesting)
Omnivore! (Score:1)
(http://www.twylacentral.com/)
Art (Score:1, Interesting)
(Last Journal: Monday October 11 2004, @12:46PM)
At least, before this leak -- as beautiful as it is, this might finally be the tipping point in getting Joe Average AOLer to understand the gravity of the drastic erosions of privacy the Western world has experienced since 9/11, and stop trusting the unencrypted text submission these logs prove we often so completely and utterly, soul-baringly do. And no one acts anywhere near the same when they have even the slightest feeling they're being watched (and, more importantly, judged). In a world where Diaries are implicitly public, who have you ever trusted more than your search bar?
Especially as, judging by these search logs, Joe Blow has a lot more to hide than even my cynical ass ever imagined. Might make some people realize the terr'rists aren't the only ones who'll be caught, charged, sentenced and executed for having something to hide.
And this leak has finally given credence to the long-cynically-mocked, longer-held Sci-Fi ideal that, in teh big, unknowable futar, all Art will be on, be of, Technology. And this horrific breach of privacy is also the greatest set of Artistic and statistical data to have ever been released to the public. I would say, since it's raw data and not just a single interpretation, it's more important than the Kinsey Report. Which is tragic, because it can never be allowed to happen again, if we want any semblance of a feeling of privacy and freedom in our civilization. It's becoming unexpectedly apparent that this will be the form of major (mainstream, big-A-)Art of the future.
Don't believe me? Read 'The Search Engine Confessions of AOL User 23187425' [lot49.com] and tell me it expresses any smaller torrent of hte raw, beautiful essense of what it is to be human than any Keats or Basho;. And that's only one piece among the very many a quick search can reveal. Many more at SomethingAwful's special edition of the Weekend Web [somethingawful.com], one of the primary progenitors, whether it was intended to be or not, of this kind of art.
Seven Deadly Search habits? (Score:4, Interesting)
(http://variableaspect.com/)
{
The Pornhound: Lust,
the Manhunter: Envy,
the Shopper: Greed,
the Obsessive: Gluttony,
the Omnivore: Sloth,
the Newbie: Anger,
the Basketcase: Pride
};
*This is my post-RTFA relational array.
I don't know... those kinda look like lyrics...
Searching can be easier than typing a URL... (Score:1)
7 deadly sins? (Score:1)
(Last Journal: Monday March 07 2005, @09:21PM)
Things to search for (Score:2)
(http://www.lacklustre.net/)
It's amazing the kind of information [click link to see, it's not just SSN] people put into a public search engine.
Not all AOLamers use AOLs search or browser (Score:1)
selected group (Score:1)
Sorry, Your Search Has Returned No Results (Score:1)
(http://www.jman.org/)
It would appear that either the analysis indicates AOL is truly the onramp for the Information Superhighway (i.e., they're all actually Newbies), or it draws a faulty conclusion.
There are as many uses for search engines as there are results. One could wish to verify a fact - or learn something new - by looking for it in a variety of ways; this would falsely look like the Omnivore category.
The fact that a Researcher or Fact Checker category was not included indicates Mr. Boutin may need to continue analyzing the data.