Slashdot Mirror
What Internet Searches Reveal About Human Desire
Hugh Pickens writes "Time Magazine reports that computational neuroscientists Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam analyzed the results of 400 million online searches for porn and uncovered some startling insights into what men and women may really want from each other. In the first place, although you can find an instance of any kind of porn you can imagine on the internet, people search for and spend money and time on 20 sexual interests, which account for 80% of all porn — the top 10 sex-related searches include variations on youth (13.5 per cent), breasts (4 per cent), cheating wives (3.4 per cent) and cheerleaders (0.1 per cent) among others. Many are surprised that "cheating wives" is such a popular search but Ogas says that it's one of the top interests all around the world because men are wired to be sexually jealous but simultaneously they're also sexually aroused so if a man sees a woman — including his partner — with another man, he becomes more aroused. Women prefer stories to visual porn by a long shot and the most popular erotica for women is the romance novel because female desire requires multiple stimuli simultaneously or in quick succession."
Lets say I'm really into Strategy games. So I search for strategy games once or twice. Find some awesome strategy games sites, bookmark them, and then visit the bookmarks directly. I'm not generating search traffic for strategy games. But I will generate a lot for FPS, games and maybe sports games, because I'm not to into those, and when I do want to find something on them, I have to search for it.
Porn is, in that sense, no different that a series of specialized niche markets. If you're really into something and, through a successful search find that 'thing', well...then you don't search for it anymore. Differentiating between traffic and search is probably not trivial however. Search to me represents traffic that is under represented, or that is advertised badly (imagine if I did a search for 'news for nerds' and didn't find /. that would not say much about interest in news for nerds, only that one of the biggest sources of news for nerds wasn't providing good results).