Survey says!: 8 out 10 AOL searchers ...
Paul Boutin at Slate took AOL's published search data and used a commercial software package to analyze what people searched for. His conclusion: AOL's data leak reveals the seven ways people search the web.
Briefly, his seven classifications are:
- The Pornhound
- The Manhunter
- The Shopper
- The Obsessive
- The Omnivore
- The Newbie
- The Bakset Case
Unfortunately the article doesn't give us percentage breakdowns for the relative population size of each of these seven groups. (For the record I believe I'd be an Omnivore, though I'd never used AOL's search prior to their releasing this data.)
Nor does the article indicate whether each person is strictly limited to being placed in a single group, or whether one person might be classified as both a Newbie and a Basket Case at the same time.
I suspect people can belong to multiple classifications since an illustrative characteristic of being a Newbie is one "who confused AOL's search box with its browser address window."
Writing a short Tcl script to count the number of unique users who had at least one search that matches the following regular expression:
{^[a-z0-9-]+(?:\.[a-z0-9-]+)*\.[a-z]{2,6}$}
I found that over 78.6% of AOL users had searched for—what appears to be—a domain name instead of using their browsers address bar directly. (516,882 out of 657,426 to be precise.)
Maybe 21.4% of AOL's customers really have taken the training wheels off?
—Michael A. Cleverly
Tuesday, August 15, 2006 at 20:37
I haven%92t any word to appreciate this post.....Really i am impressed from this post....the person who create this post it was a great human..thanks for shared this with us. garage door repair Federal Way WA
Sat, 03 Jul 2021, 12:20