Slashdot Mirror
The 7 Ways That People Search the Web
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.'"
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.
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.
Somethingawful posted what is presumably the first part in a series of gold from the AOL search logs: http://www.somethingawful.com/index.php?a=4016 These would definitely fit in the 'basketcase' category...
"'Yrch!' said Legolas, falling into his own tongue."
So was Neo a manhunter, an obsessive, or just an omnivore?
Although AOL represents a certain niche market. i.e. it's heavily skewed towards n00bs.
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.
Execute? [Y/N] _
The one thing Pornhunter's search terms are probably missing is him googling his own name.
Admit it, which one of you never googled their own name?
Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
The one that kills me is the website that is huge and poorly organized. I will remember the main website, but damn if I can remember how to get to the particular page I need... or if I really want to navigate through six slow-loading pages to get there.
Just want to point out that the search history given is theoretically not tied to the individual. Though those who ego-search are out of luck, I guess... unless names searched for are redacted.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
But if you've googled yourself and other people, it's a little trickier to determine from the list which one is you.
Though if the list of names contains 25 celebrities and "Joe Smith," it might not be hard to narrow down. At that point, you're the guy in the red shirt who beamed down to the hostile planet with Kirk, Spock, McCoy and Scotty. Yeah, the monsters could kill anyone in the party, but it doesn't take much effort to guess who it'll be.
As someone who remembers when they claimed to stop logging (which was an indication that hey, maybe loging conversations was a good idea), I could only hope that such an archive both exists and makes it way public. I'd love to have access to logs that were stored long ago on a hard drive far, far away. As someone who has whole CDs full of logs, it'd be great (to those who used the service back then) to have access to this kind of great historical crap. Then again, it's also kinda scary and dementedly evil. Pros, cons.
--Reverend Raven
Desperate days demand dire deeds.
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.
Okay, the bit about Omnivores who hit IMDb all the time hits a little too close to home here. :)
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.
Notice one key factor here: These people all use AOL. That's naturally going to self-select your data towards certain segments of the population which might exhibit different inclinations than rest of the group.
I am officially gone from
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' 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, one of the primary progenitors, whether it was intended to be or not, of this kind of art.
{
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...
---k--
</stupid>
If they really log it, I really hope they use a compression that checks the redundancy of messages, considered all the porn spam bot messages. Oh well that probably mostly affects AIM (to the point there isn't even any conversation ever going on anymore, I recently tried, blocked all the bots and waited, and lurking during half an hour all you could see was a couple of 14 year old girls saying hello and leaving as soon) but if they log AOL chatrooms why wouldn't they log AIM too?
This being said, I'll never understand how they can let the spam bots eat away that much bandwidth while letting them literally eradicate life from these chatrooms, I'll also never understand why spam bot owners keep doing that since they chased people away, it's like a TV channel with nothing but crappy commercials on like 24/7, why even keep running it or even put your commercial on it if nobody watches anymore..
You just got troll'd!