Social networking sites are the hottest attraction on the Internet, dethroning pornography and highlighting a major change in how people communicate, according to a web guru.
Bill Tancer, a self-described “data geek”, has analyzed information for over 10 million web users to conclude that we are, in fact, what we click, with Internet searches giving an up-to-date view of how society and people are changing.
There is one big problem I can see with this sort of ‘survey’
And thats the idea that people only find things by searching for it on a search engine.
For people new to the internet or for people looking for a new subject (especially since we went away from sites such as Yahoo for categorised links) you’d search via Google. But once you know some good links you’ll just type them right in, or follow bookmarks. I think I’m right in saying that this bypassed the statistics Bill Tancer gathered and assessed.
It does always confuse me, what sort of people do searches for things like ‘Facebook’, ‘Myspace’? The names are the addresses, go right there!!
I can understand more ‘complicated’ searches such as instead of “Britney Spears”, you have “britney Spears” + “naked” or what have you, but the simple searches always seem to rise to the top searches for lists I’ve seen in the past.
And if he’s gathered information from surveys, I’ve often found that they are too long, want to know all the sites you look at (on a weekend it must run into the hundreds) so you end up just truncating it or lying about things. I did do a survey a few months ago that made you choose categories forthe type of sites you looked at and there were several glaring omissions!