The 7 Ways That People Search the Web 239
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.'"
They missed out the Googler (Score:1, Insightful)
Just a note on the Obsessive (Score:5, Insightful)
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)
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.
This is Fascinating, But ... (Score:3, Insightful)
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...)
Assumptions (Score:5, Insightful)
The article is an interesting read but I'm not buying into his category system.
Re:One, two, three, four, five, six. (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
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.
Re:Why TIA is a bad idea (Score:5, Insightful)
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
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!
Re:So AOL is ...... The Breakfast Club??? (Score:2, Insightful)
Of course, the fact that I think that probably means I'm an old geezer
Re:Very interesting... (Score:1, Insightful)
People might think it's funny now that they can read about some poor girl who got herself pregnant and then search for questions about divine forgiveness for abortion, but it really isn't funny and the people laughing at it are jackasses at best and sociopaths at worst.
Anyone who cares at all, for real, about personal privacy should be appalled at this and not making jokes about it. My 2 cents.
Re:One, two, three, four, five, six. (Score:2, Insightful)
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.