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 seven ways that people post on Slashdot.
The First Poster - Although this phenominon has been addressed and has somewhat lessened, there are still echoes of "First Post". These people wait on a "Mysterious Furure" story as post stupidities just to get in first.
The Fisher - These posters, rarely named Bobby, check-in with a kingly posts to generate replies and nothing more. Their posts, perhaps at first, seem to make sense, but on closer review contain mnay misstakes, intentionally designed to garner replies.
The old-timer - These posters, who hang around slashdot land, have forgotten to move on. They post just to show off their low slashdot id. This makes some druel, and others comment that low id does not mean more intelligent. However, they're all wrong anyway.
The reposter - Reposters wait for old stories to come up again and find modded-up comments from the old stories to repost. If this is the first time such a story is up, they post a bunch of old buzzwords that realign synergistic paradigm shifts.
The soap stander - Soap-Standers have what to say, and don't care where they say it, such as about why Bush is beery good, and that the UN and its anonymous leader are drunkards, and no amount of coffee will help.
The idiot - Idiots can't count, post moronic comments, and quickly type in useless garbage to fill in a little more space.
Have you read my journal today?
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."
I know that I often can't recall websites I've been to once but want to revisit. I will, however, often remember the search terms that got me there -- sometimes very specific search terms, since I've narrowed it down from my first wide-net search.
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.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
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.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
The people who switch Tor nodes for every search they perform, so that later, then don't end up having articles written about them calling them weirdos and porn-freaks. Sheesh, what's wrong with horses?
This is a sig. It is appended to the end of comments I post.
"For we are all the Pornhound, the Manhunter, the Shopper, the Obsessive, the Omnivore, the Newbie, and the Basketcase, sincerely, the Breakfast Club"
Probably most people on this board are too young to remember anyway....
... it is nothing compared to the tremendous fallout that would befall the Interweb, should AOL ever unleash accidentally almost 13 years of collected AOL chatroom dialogue. It's one thing to see the search strings of User #24601, but quite another to see just what he says when emboldened by conversational anonymity. Of course, AOL would say now that they don't have that kind of data, that they haven't been logging chat since the earliest days of version 2.0 ... but come on, would you throw away all of that beautiful demographic fodder?
"Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you mad."
-- Aldous Huxley
From TFA: The searches of AOL user No. 672368, for example, morphed over several weeks from "you're pregnant he doesn't want the baby" to "foods to eat when pregnant" to "abortion clinics charlotte nc" to "can christians be forgiven for abortion."
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_McCarthyJoe 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...)
This guy makes a lot of assumptions in his analysis. I often search for a single topic multiple times - not out of obsession, but to refine my search. Sometimes I didn't get what I was looking for the first time, so I'll go back and sift through the 2nd and 3rd pages. Sometimes I search again because I can't remember where the best page was. Each new search for the same topic may lead me to change my search target - at first I might be looking to buy a product at a major retailer, only to realize later that it might be available used. These are all reasons to repeat a search that have nothing to do with obsession. Also, the author may have labelled someone as "Obsessive" when they are searching for "texas real estate" when in fact they work in the real estate industry.
The article is an interesting read but I'm not buying into his category system.
More importantly, does that mean Trinity worked for AOL?
Give a man fire, and you warm him for the night. Set a man on fire, and you warm him for the rest of his life.
"Do niggers have x-ray vision" Truly frightening. Also note the large religious influence in a lot of the searches.
...that nobody knows how to spell "beastiality"?
You've hit upon something there. Perhaps 90% of my wife's usage of the internet is visiting 4 sites: Moviefone, Hotmail, MSN games, and IMDB. Does she use the convenient bookmark function... nope! Instead, her preferred solution is to home page Google and search for the sites there. I've explained the inherent wastefulness of using search for something where just typing into the Firefox's address bar will do the trick... but no dice.
I do have fun with it and occasionally, block Google on my DNS and watch as she complains that the internet is down.
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!
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.
How on earth does 'missing out the Googler' show that AOL is biased? The article wasn't even written by somebody at AOL.
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.
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
{
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--
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