Slashdot Mirror
Changing Use of Internet?
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?"
People have already found their porn and don't need to search for it anymore.
"Twenty percent of all searching was sex-related back in 1997; now it's about 5 percent,"
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.
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
Now you can put that four years of school to work at home in your spare time selling and buying stuff on eBay for the russian mafia.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
So, basically.. your telling me that I should drop out of the Computer Science program at my school and pick up a degree in MIS, so I can make crappy webpages the rest of my life?
Paint.NET, a Free Image Editor, with Source Code Available!
What hasn't changed much in seven years is how hard people are willing to work at searching. The answer: not very. Spink and Jansen found that people averaged about two words per query and two queries per search session.
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?
That should be internets.
It would also be interesting to compare shopping not just with sex, but with political subject-matter.
Open Source Music: anotherdreamer.net
Hello? Of course it's dropped: most people don't use search engines for pr0n anymore. They use P2P!!!!
I wonder how much of a percentage increase there's been in P2P search terms?
"Twenty percent of all searching was sex-related back in 1997; now it's about 5 percent"
That doesn't really tell us much besides how many people searched for sex-related things through a search-engine. Many people nowdays know they'll have much better luck if they use Kazaa/Bittorrent/DC++/etc.
You can't use Kazaa to buy a microwave, though.
Sex searches for YOU!
Doods,
Sorry, it was me who cut down on the sex searches and stuff. I'm getting older, and there are more things involved in life now. I know, it's an old excuse to cut down. Wife and kidz will do that to you someday as well. I had figured there was another young rebel behind me, so make sure Libby and Jenna would still get plenty of page hits in seach engines. I thought I passed the torch to some first class deviants. Instead, you search for Biz and TV and crap. You don't deserve the internet.
Spack
"That makes sense because e-commerce in the last seven years has boomed," said Gary Price, news editor of SearchEngineWatch.com, a branch of Connecticut-based Jupitermedia.com, which reports on Internet surfing. (emphasis mine)
Didn't Wired say that they wouldn't capitalize "internet" any longer? Liars!
And interestingly the original story appears to be gone.
When I first started on the Internet, it consisted of academic nerds, computer scientists, a very small handful of professionals (doctors, lawyers, clergy, etc.) and system administrators. Pretty bland.
Nowadays with the great Mass on the 'net things are much more entertaining.
BLING BLING. Meet the architecture that's changing everything.
"Remember when cars came out, and people would say, 'Wow, we're going for a ride today!' Now they just go for a ride."
Yeah... and while we're at it... does anyone miss using the telegraph?
Could this be a new area of tech jobs, setting up and maintaining ecommerce sites, creating search assisting applications?
Yea... it's called a search engine...
I don't think anyone would be surprised by or interested in these findings. All you have to see the trend is look at google search results for any product. Most results in the first few pages are for ecommerce sites. Add to that the sponsored links on the sides and top of the page. Try finding any personal pages about a Thinkpad T41.
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.
In other words, that which was super-hot and world-transforming back in the late '90s gold rush is hot again?
Or is it that nowadays companies are actually simply using the Internet as a tool instead of trying to change the world? The companies that survived the meltdown are now (mostly) making money, and the new ones have learned from the lessons of the failed ones. Nobody blinks when Amazon makes a profit any more, after all.
Pr0n was what everybody was hunting for back in the days when the Internet was a novelty - but nowadays that's a wasted use of a search engine. It's not so much that the uses of the Internet have changed. It's more that the Internet isn't "shiny and new" anymore, so a lot of the things that were popular when it was a novelty aren't such a big deal any more.
Here on Slashdot, though, we just keep on chugging along...
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
Red Moon appears in the sky
Boston wins the world series
INTERNET BEING USED FOR SOMETHING PRODUCTIVE
Oh dear lord, we're all doomed!
Let's get one thing perfectly clear, I did not vote for George W Bush, and I do not endorse what he does or says.
"
Translation: They've already got all the free porn. Now they're looking to buy more.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
I wonder how much of a percentage increase there's been in P2P search terms?
Not much, probably. P2P may be widespread, but notorious for sometimes having shaky connections and low speeds, as well as being dependent on the number of horny 30-year-olds online at a given point in time.
Twenty percent of all searching was sex-related back in 1997; now it's about 5 percent
They see this and find some sort of shift in the way people are using the Internet.
I see this and think "SLACKERS!!!!"
Why would anyone need to use a search engine to look for porn? I mean, doesn't one out of every three spam messages have a link to some new porn site?
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.
-- If god wanted me to have a sig, he'd have given me a sense of humor.
There's not as many sex searches cause seeing 30 new people a day getting it more than you are gets depressing after awhile.
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
I think most people, like myself, now know where to get their pr0n and don't need to search anymore. I always go straight to: www.thumbnailpost.com for my free pr0n. *WARNING* THIS IS NOT A WORK_SAFE WEBSITE!
People in search of pornography and sex are much more willing to actively search it out and be early adopters of new technologies that may further their habits. Heck, I was on USENET getting pr0n when I was still in high school!
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.
Execute? [Y/N] _
Look, man, it's over. The crazy tech boom is done. Let it go. Take some management classes or something. You keep this up and we're going to report you to Unemployed Tech Workers Anonymous and organize an intervention for you.
From the Article:
"Remember when cars came out, and people would say, 'Wow, we're going for a ride today!' Now they just go for a ride." Oh yes, how could ANY of us not remember that! Hey, you guys remember the time Lothar was smashing those rocks together and invented fire. Ahh, those were the days..
What hasn't changed much in seven years is how hard people are willing to work at searching. The answer: not very. Spink and Jansen found that people averaged about two words per query and two queries per search session.
"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.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
There you go:
Google search for s3x
Google search for pr0n
In other news, "Internet searches" for the terms in question skyrocketed through the roof today leaving the UPitt and Pennstate researchers puzzled and dismayed. It appears one of the Master's thesis was withdrawn after the event. More at 11.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
"Twenty percent of all searching was sex-related back in 1997; now it's about 5 percent," It seems to me that porn is now served up on P2P networks so there is no need to do any "searching"
I need some PORN... ooooh, donut!
Just another "Cubible(sic) Joe" 2 17 3061
Talk about exportable jobs...
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
Back in 1997 the only people who were using the internet at all were people looking for porn. I remember in 1996 being at a friends house and seeing all the free porn and thinking "I have to get this internet thing!"
Now that the internet has become ubiquitus a much greater number of people have access and are accessing it. So now the percentage of people searching for porn is approaching the percentage of the general public who buy adult magazines, or rent adult videos (which is a lot higher that you think).
"...far fewer searches for sex and pornography..."
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.
Undersexed nerds have gone from 20% of the users in 1997 to 5% today as more and more *regular* people can get computers and connected to the internet.
Your comma should be a semicolon.
"Twenty percent of all searching was sex-related back in 1997; now it's about 5 percent," said Amanda Spink
All this means is that companies have managed to crack down on their poor, girlfriendless developers.
"Twenty percent of all searching was sex-related back in 1997; now it's about 5 percent,"
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...=)
With the first link, the chain is forged.
There has been a fundamental shift in the way information is perceived.
The current election is the best example. More people have more access to information about this election than in any other part in history. The BLOG has reached new heights because of it. Some larger BLOGs have been able to score advertising dollar. As new topics to discuss become available - other BLOGs will pop up to debate and discuss them.
Once these BLOGs reach a certain point... you have a person who has the ability to write the content but not maintain the advertising, budget, time, maintenance.
This is where the support industry will start to focus - on the upkeep of smaller niche networks.
You'll have 20 smaller clients rather than 3 large accounts.
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
"Twenty percent of all searching was sex-related back in 1997; now it's about 5 percent,"
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.
"Twenty percent of all searching was sex-related back in 1997; now it's about 5 percent,"
Well, easy, I got a girlfiend since '98!
This comment was written using 100% reused electrons.
Its been a long day...
I read that as combine shopping not just with sex, but with political subject matter.
Now the first two no problem, but now I have this mental image of paying certain major political candidates for sex that I can't get out of my head. Of course, we'll get screwed in the end anyway...
"Unheard of means only it's undreamed of yet,
Impossible means not yet done." ~~ Julia Ecklar
Could this be a new area of tech jobs, setting up and maintaining ecommerce sites, creating search assisting applications?
That looks like a long winded variation on googlejacking.
"Surprising that people don't use more complex searches"
I've noticed that for shopping, simple search means biggest distributor means decent price and accountability. Is this a chicken and egg situation? Is it just a sign of more mainstream-ness to the internet? Anyone else noticed Google just doesn't pop out the best results anymore?
My little site.
"That makes sense because e-commerce in the last seven years has boomed," said Gary Price, news editor of SearchEngineWatch.com, a branch of Connecticut-based Jupitermedia.com, which reports on Internet surfing."
I thought they weren't going to capitalize the word internet anymore?
The internet certainly has changed. Instead of surfing for porn or searching for hours to find an mp3 or picture or whatever, it's all at my finger tips.
But I rely so much on the internet to function on a daily basis. I think about this all the time. When I have a question now, the first place I look is Google. Very rarely can I not find an answer that comes from a relatively reputable source. And it is much quicker than any means of research.
Also, I show and pay all of my bills online. This is a big convenience, no more paper checks or bills, no more stamps.
But what would my life be like without the internet now? I can honestly say that if I were 100% cut off from the internet I would find it difficult to adjust for awhile. Sure, I can go back to snail mail and stamps and all of that without too much of a fuss, but I rely on the internet for my news most of the time as well.
But I would find it very difficult to do research of any type, or simply to answer a nagging question about whatever topic we happen to talk about at the water cooler. The convenience of having billions of web pages at my finger tips has hobbled my ability to research in any other fashion, and made me impatient when I can't get an answer in 2 minutes of Google'ing.
Anyone else out there have the same problem?
I'm getting fed up with links to reports of bad data. This survey, the one about MP3's dying, etc... It's sad when so many people all pop on Slashdot and say the same thing about how inaccurate the report is within seconds of the posting. Too much bad data in the limelight. Do we really need it here too? At least the sites posting it get slashdotted for a while as punishment.
[insert sig file here]
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.
sigs, as if you care.
No. I meant that to be written as if I were sending it over a modem, where a comma is a pause. ,,,
You , see ,,, a semicolon would just be ignored, and then the whole message would ,,, wel ,, be ,,, out of ,,, time.
,,,, Want a cup of Tea?
And Yes,,, I am Insane.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
Your sig mentions that Slashdot is standards compliant in Japan. Perhaps I'm missing the joke, but Slashdot Japan seems to use about the same slashcode version, and has all the same non-standard body tag attributes, excessive table tags, and unescaped ampersands in URLs. Could you clarify your sig?
You like splinters in your crotch? -Jon Caldara
...is that of all the ecommerce searches, 90% were for porn goods.
"Well, thanks to the Internet I'm now bored with sex."
...it just happened about 1,000 years early.
-Fry, A Bicyclops Built For Two
I'm not sure that it's just age or marriage. When a google desktop search comes up with 1,817 results for the keyword porn, how much more do we need to search the net? When there is 300GB of images and videos filtered for preference, what more can the porn sites offer? 300GB is more than many of the pay sites out there offer.
No, think the real change is because we've been collecting the porn since 1997 (or 1987) and we just don't need any more. The 5% are 18-20 year olds starting thier collection.
that's a novel idea, but I don't think it will take off.
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.
clicky
The Internet Is for Porn!
Porn seekers have helped develop several fledgling markets. In the 70s, some of the earliest adopters of VCRs were people who wanted to watch porn in the privacy of their own home. These people went on to buy video cameras. In the 90s, they started using Usenet and the web to download stills. Their demand for streaming video opened up the market for high speed connections, chat rooms, web cams, and other tools. Now they've moved on to P2P. There are probably cases that predate the 70s, but I haven't thought about it much. People who seek porn display many of the characteristics of early adopters, paving the way for technology adoption. Of course, the father of diffusion of innovations / technology adoption put his research to work in health education, a slightly more noble focus. :)
-- SYS 64738 --
The last sentence is "I think people aren't trained very well to use the search engines."
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...
--- 11 meters/second, or 24 miles per hour - the airspeed velocity of an unladen European swallow. Really.
Is this part of AOL's plan to "make the internet better"?
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.
Added to cron and forgotten about... At least until that new 160gb disk you put in to the machine runs out of space.
Deleted
If the researchers are old enough to remember cars coming out, their brains are fossilized.
This has only happened since 2002 -- forget 1997.
I actually already predicted the apocalypse for today, let me explain.
;)
I have Dr. Stroustrop (C++ Stroustrop) as one of my lecturers here at Texas A&M.
Yesterday, he said "howdy"
It was weird as hell.
Later on in the class, he made a reference to the HHGTG
Today, I have my calculus exam, on my last calculus exam, I got a 42, exactly
Yesterday was also an eclipse, an obvious sign that the planets are aligning.
I for one welcome our apocalyptic overlords...
Error 407 - No creative sig found
The decrease in the amount of pr0n searching has little to do with the sophistication of users, and more to do with the breakdown of marriage and the increase in divorce.
Pr0n searching and marriage have an incremental relationship
seek_porn = years_married^2/((num_cute_chicks_in_area)^2)^-1
seeing a 15% drop (20% - 5% )in pr0n searches would indicate that marriages are failing at an earlier rate than they were in the 1990's.
or, it could also suggest that McDonalds and Burger King have reduced the number of cute chicks in the local area to an unsustainable sexually interested level.
Uh, no Barry, I don't remember when cars came out, how frickin' old ARE you!?
And, hello, "cyberspace researcher" at University of Toronto? Is that your official title?? What's that pay, I have a few websites to research...
Back then, searching was returning crappy results. Because of that, when I found an interesting site, I was bookmarking it. Now, I just search it with Google rather than search my bookmark list (it's faster!).
If I want PuTTY, I search that word in Google, click the first link.
If I want info on printf format, I search "printf format" and again, click on the first link.
So for my part, I do a lot more search than I used too. Because of that, "special interests" are not, in porportion as important as before.
I know I've changed from irc to porn to newsgroups to webcams to tech stuff then slowly slashdot. Then I got a wife and a kid and now I'm stuck to surf at work. Since we're behind a proxy I must use links and telnet.
printf($randomline(sigs.txt) \n "-- "$randomline(authors.txt));
-- myself
..said of the findings. "Remember when cars came out, and people would say, 'Wow, we're going for a ride today!'" ...
What *I* want to know is: just how old are these researchers?
For me, I've actually dropped down a bit on the porn searches as I age, but another factor for me was that in late college, the University I went to was getting better at filtering out porn. At work now, I use the internet a ton, and I'm not brave enough to search for porn at the desk. I think much of the decline may have to do with people using the internet at work much more, and the porn searches remain an "at home" only activity.
Maybe these two are just so out-a-touch that they don't recognise sex/porn keywords when they see them in a search query. Hard-core porn freaks are going to be looking for the good illegal stuff which is purposely hard to find if you don't know the correct lingo.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Once I found WebGrazer, I pretty much never needed to search for pr0n ever again.
;)
For OS X only
Stay in school finish the CS degree, but do not leave until you get a Business degree to go with it. I whish I had. The 300 level business department courses I took for my "area of emphasis" (MIS) in my CS program were a spoonfeeding trip to candyland compared to Chem, Diff. Eq. and other CS *PREREQS* for cryin' out loud. By the time you're done with a BS. You should be able to almost sleep through a BA in biz in about 1 to 1 & 1/2 years. Durring that time you can audit all of the cool 400/500 level CS programs you like. While you're at it, spend a bit more time and get the cute little MBA. Hell, it's not even a thesis masters:) The technical jobs that stand best NOT to be offshored are the ones that require business and people skills as well as knowing something of what happens behind the scenes when you hit "Google Search" or "I'm Feeling Lucky" on everyones favorite search engine.
*** Sigs are a stupid waste of bandwidth.
"Twenty percent of all searching was sex-related back in 1997"...
and a little later:
"They're not getting excited about using the internet anymore"
Instead of running multiple searches for porn aimlessly, I've outsourced my porn search to India. There, my more experienced and better educated counterpart can find the latest "monkey knife fight bang party" in one search, for $2.50 / month.
a quick googling (not for porn) reveals this has been done on the entire AOL log for many categories: porn 10%, shopping 13%, entertainment 13%, computing 9%, etc.
research paper here.
I never said you were wrong. You're taking my reactions the wrong way. So; I appologise. Obviously; you are right. But its a joke. You pointed out an gramatical error in a joke on Slashdot. How can that be taken seriously? When you responded to my joke seriously; I responded with another joke. Lighten up. Its Slashdot. Don't take everything so seriously. Maybe you didn't find any of my jokes funny. Ok; thats fine. Critisism accepted. I'll try better next time.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
Wired has been saying this since '98... Internet trade magazines are a lot more useful if the main use of www is something other than porn.
If you ask me it's because more and more people are shopping on the internet from work. Because they can get away with it.
What the ramifications are for society, and civilization, is more than I can wrap my little head around.
As far as I can tell, there seems to be two major lines of theories on that:
a) Uniformity
b) Polarization
The uniformity theory and its derivates claim that we're all getting more equal. Culture, ethics, society and language mix across borders, ethnic regions and social groups. In this way we approach a monoculture around the world. Positive directions consider this to be universal standards of human rights, freedoms of speech, religion, that all are created free and equal, greater tolerance etc. etc. Negative directions consider this to be cultural imperialism, a threat to national identity and way of life etc.
The polarization theory says that through the internet, we all find tiny subcultures which create their own standards, with little regard to society as a whole. These groups drift further and further apart because of lack of interaction and different viewpoints from the greater community, polarizing society. Positive directions say this will lead to greater personal self-realization and that that your individual qualities and interests are more appriciated. Negative directions consider this to be society breaking down, with isolationist and extremist groups basicly brainwashing people through groupthink.
Personally, I don't think the difference is that incredibly big. I know people which, Internet or not, isolate themselves by socializing with people reenforcing their own groupthink, and I know people that seek out those with conflicting viewpoints and interact with them. None of the theories are really false, none are really true. They all happen to some degree.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Is that what you call yourself if you fail Computer Science in college?
After a few years, if you're lucky, she becomes useful for more mundane tasks like shopping etc. After even longer you won't even know she's there.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
News Flash: new "e-commerce" and "search" technologies to hit the internet(s)"
Could this be a new area of tech jobs, setting up and maintaining ecommerce sites, creating search assisting applications
Seriously, was this meant to be sarcastic?
[mod article +5:Funny]
I wonder if they derived something out of their search results...
pr0n
pr0n
pr0n
slashdot
pr0n
pr0n...
The friendliest digital photography forums on the net!
I haven't seen the data, just the WIRED article, but we should have a few questions about the research and the conclusions. How do percentages compare to total numbers? How were the results "randomly selected"? Were location, demographics or time of day taken into account? Maybe more people are surfing from their work, where porn is blocked by firewalls or would be deemed socially unacceptable. Maybe more children are online. Maybe more low-income people are online. Are AltaVista users really representative of the entire Internet population, or was it just the handiest data source? According to this, this and this, AltaVista has barely any search engine market share left. Could AltaVista users simply be more intent on more information-savvy results rather than porn, simply because they're only trying AltaVista after being not fully satisfied with results elsewhere? (...and porn users can get their fill elsewhere?)
And, without studying other search engines, you cannot say that all people are taking less than five minutes, and only looking at the first two pages of results. Maybe that's because AltaVista's results and interface suck, compared to Google and others.
The best these researchers can really say is, "This suggests further research."
$nice = $webHosting + $domainNames + $sslCerts
"they're only looking at the first page of esults," [...] "That's why people are wanting to get their results on the first page"
Will this kind of behaviour result in information oligopolies/archies?
There will be a small number of dominant sites that people get in searches and then link to increasing thier pageranks.