Changing Use of Internet? 181
CodeHog writes "Wired has an interesting article on the perceived changing use of the Internet. Perceived perhaps because it appears that these findings are based partly on search topics. What's more interesting is what it means to the tech community at large. Could this be a new area of tech jobs, setting up and maintaining ecommerce sites, creating search assisting applications?"
You Miles May Vary (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe people are now accessing sex-related sites via links in spams, why seek when it comes to you?
and randomly selected thousands of search sessions from more than 1 million they culled anonymously from search engines such as AltaVista.
Is AltaVista still a credible source for research?
All in all, I believe the change in searching pattern may more likely be caused by returned results. At the moment there are too many noises when searching for real sex-related sites, most of them are full of pop-up and nothing useful, but a e-commerce search may return more desirable results, thus people keep on searching them.
Maybe the searching has just gotten better? (Score:5, Insightful)
What has changed though is that two words per query gives a much more accurate result than it used to. I use google for everything including UPS Tracking, math conversions, and tracking down where/when my name/email address is used. This sort of information just wasn't available 7+ years ago.
People aren't searching so much for porn because there is so much more information that is already indexed. You used to search for X and most of the first page of results were for porn. Perhaps that's why it seemed so popular? Maybe it was because the earliest adopters of the Internet were "fringe" people more interested in finding other "fringe" activities?
Re:No, it just means (Score:5, Insightful)
What?? ...already have them! (Score:3, Insightful)
Yea... it's called a search engine...
google search results (Score:5, Insightful)
7 years ago, few trusted the online purchasing process. Submitting credit card info, worrying about refunds and credit, vendor trustworthiness, hackers, etc.
Since then, there's been a gold rush on the Internet. All major retailers and business people moved in smelling money. That made the process of buying stuff faster, more streamlined and more secure. It takes a handfull of clicks to buy stuff on eBay and pay for it with paypal. So obviously more people were attracted by it, the process achieved mass market appeal, and it pushed everything out of the way.
I don't see where the news is.
Re:You Miles May Vary (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:No, it just means (Score:4, Insightful)
Why search for porn? (Score:5, Insightful)
Type any word into the address bar, and chances are it'll link to some porn site. Misspell any popular website and likewise you'll see porn.
Nobody has to search for it, it's pretty hard to avoid.
Makes sense to me (Score:3, Insightful)
E-commerce and shopping is more of a "mainstream" use of the Internet and it makes sense now that the Internet has become so pervasive. Even average users are learning how to go onto Amazon and order stuff. If my mother-in-law can do it, anyone can.
Re:MIS (Score:5, Insightful)
I have an advanced degree in computer science. Trust me, there's nothing stopping you from getting your degree and having a future filled with making crappy webpages. :)
Re:You Miles May Vary (Score:4, Insightful)
In addtion to your point about the crap that is returned by a generic search for 'sex', What I really think is happening is that the volume of searches is going up, while people are becoming familiar with 'their favorite' hotspots and they don't need to look.
Lazyness (Score:4, Insightful)
"The searches are taking less than five minutes, and they're only looking at the first page of results," Spink said. "That's why people are wanting to get their results on the first page" of search engine results.
"We were surprised that people weren't doing more complex searches," Spink said. "If you put a couple of words into the web, you're going to get hundreds of thousands of results. I think people aren't trained very well to use the search engines."
Having worked in a college library having to help other students find stuff I am amazed at how non-geeks think all they have to do is type in a word/sentence/phrase and they think the computer will magically bring them what they are looking for. It would take an hour to get them to grasp the idea of "keywords" and that putting in more keywords only narrows the results without using any operators (AND, OR). Even when they came back with zero results they would add more words thinking that they could get a hit this time. The main reason is that most people have no idea how the search engines work and instead think that it is as capable as a human sitting down and looking at everything. When they learn how it all works they will start doing smarter seaches and get less lazy.
Re:You Miles May Vary (Score:1, Insightful)
Question the data... (Score:2, Insightful)
Less searching for sex may mean less interest in sex OR it may mean that the criteria used to rate a search for sex has not kept up with the sort of sex people are searching for.
"...people averaged about two words per query and two queries per search session..."
Maybe it's just easier to find stuff now. I don't think so. Do a search on almost any exotic term and the first page on google's right hand column will offer dozens of links to people wishing to sell, "See ebay for greatest selection of VAMPIRE BAT GUANO AND PSITTACOSIS"
"...people aren't trained very well to use the search engines..."
dammit, when will google implement the ever so nice altavista NEAR relationship to go along with all the booleans. NEAR is extremely useful for weeding out those 'spam the search engine' web sites and those 'catalog of catalogs of catalogs of shit that only one company on earth actually makes' when all you want is that companies contact info.
Re:No, it just means (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm full up (Score:2, Insightful)
I'd say most people have more porn than they can look at in a lifetime, and in addition now that EVERYONE is using the internet, a much smaller percentage of the overall searching population are horny geeks. I had a webpage in 97 (and was in highschool), so you can guess what part of the searching population I fell into...=)
Change in demographics of users... (Score:4, Insightful)
How much of this has to do with more women and old people on the internet? I doubt that the number of overall sex searches is down, but the demographics of internet users have likely changed a lot since 1997. On top of that, add in the amount of filtering software nowadays in the workplace and academia alone that discourages that sort of thing.
Re:What?? ...already have them! (Score:2, Insightful)
So, i predict that we'll see more businesses that 1) allow alternative visual views into search results, 2) use data-mining techniques to create decision support tools, 3) provide "consulting" services to hopeless search-hampered users.
Manager speak (Score:3, Insightful)
That looks like a long winded variation on googlejacking.
Re:You Miles May Vary (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, I get almost everything I need from spam. Sex, drugs, drugs for sex, real fake rolex watches, mortgages, free TVs, iPods, Xboxes, cures for SARS and AIDS, college degrees (up to PhD!), free money, cheap software and computers. All that from scanning my spam inbox.
OK, when I first saw this article, everyone knows that you cannot search for sex or porn on the net. It simply does not work. It does not work for MP3s either. Wayyyy too much corruption and bs here.
Porn is done through the tgp sites, and they are fine. If anyone needs more than what they can find from a good tgp site, they are already paying for porn in some way or another.
At the moment there are too many noises when searching for real sex-related sites, most of them are full of pop-up and nothing useful, but a e-commerce search may return more desirable results, thus people keep on searching them.
I guess we agree.
What I really want from google is for them to completely separate froogle from google. I hate doing a search for information and I get a bunch of results for selling me crap, and I don't know if I want to buy it or not. That is why I'm googling around. I've heard tips like putting '-order' or '-shipping' with searches, but thats too complex for "normal folk". I have no problem with google making $$$ from searches, but when its appropriate.
BTW, google has done a great job of eliminating blatently self-googlebombed sites. There was a time when retailers would buy a bunch of domains and have them all point to each other with the same crap on each page. That sucked.
Peace out.
Green Tennis Shoes Principle (Score:5, Insightful)
I refer to that as the Green Tennis Shoes Principle. Somewhere in your area there is someone whose very favorit thing is green tennis shoes. It's their life, but no one understands. The Internet makes it possible for these isolated folks to communicate and share their perspective with each other.
Seen across the entire spectrum of favorite things, you have a whole series of microcultures (and thus micromarkets) that didn't exist 10 years ago.
It used to be that the bulk of Internet content was computer-related, since you have to have a computer to get to the Internet. It was of universal interest, and within that you had everyone from the PDP-8-lovers list to people wanting recipe programs for their Mac.
As non-geeks got connected, sex became the least common denominator. Within that (I would guess) the principle still applies, as people approach that from different points of view as well.
As people are using computers and the Internet for everything, and searches are getting easier and more effective, all the most common interests are splintering and the microcultures are maturing.
What the ramifications are for society, and civilization, is more than I can wrap my little head around.
Wired Demographics (Score:3, Insightful)
I think Wired is getting confused about the demographic of their market. For some odd reason, I think very few of their readers can remember when cars came out. Personally, I hope some people are sitting with their grand parents, but I doubt they routinely read "Wired" articles to the dwindling population that can remember when cars came out.
PS, cars were already around when I was born, and I am considered too old by most hiring managers to program computers.
I RTFA'd (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm stuck between going "No duh?" and "bull!#*&".
No duh because, take a look around and see who's online - pretty much anyone who wants to be. You think they're going to bother learning how to optimize search results so that Google will pull 100 records instead of 15,000? As long as they get what they want, the answer is a vehement "No."
"Bull!$#%" because, on the flip side, maybe people shouldn't be required to take training in order to search effectively. Maybe someone should write a search engine that Just Works. Oh, wait... [google.com]
Simple use of search engines (Score:3, Insightful)
Don't be surprised - people seem to need training for everything, even rather simple tasks like search. Let's face it, using quotes and expected words in your search narrows down your results substantially, and it is extremely easy to do. But while it's hard for this crowd (or Wired's) to understand, most users need to take Search 101 rather than figure it out themselves.
Search is just the tip of the iceberg. When some (maybe even most) people sit in front of a computer they lose access to about half their brain cells for some still unexplained reason. This is why we have spyware, unpatched machines running mail trojans for spammers, and e-mails with Word document attachments containing the text that should have been in the e-mail. Welcome to the Internet. Do try to avoid the braindead during your stay.