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.'"

Comments

One, two, three, four, five, six.

[Riding Spinners]

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.

On that note

[smclean]

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...

The Pirate

[Experiment 626]

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.

Seven Deadly Search habits?

[not-enough-info]

And now, for a baseless comparison:
{
        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.

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.'"

I don't know... those kinda look like lyrics...