You are what you search

Don’t you just love it when something that you’ve been seriously suspecting, and trying to explain to people, is suddenly mentioned by someone else, together with some statistical data to back it up? Well, I do.

As you’ve probably heard by now (a billion times), AOL has recently released a few million records of its users’ search history. Plenty of people jumped on to it – all for their own reasons. One guy, among these people, studied the data and came up with this report (linked to from this Slashdot post), categorizing people into seven groups, based on their search terms.

Here is a quote from the article that made me feel glad and proud:

My favorite plots show hours of G-rated searches before the user switches gears—what I call the Avenue Q Theory of Internet usage. User No. 190827 goes from “talking parrots jokes” and “poems about a red rose” before midnight to multiple clicks for “sexy dogs and hot girls” a half hour later.

I’ve been saying for a long time – you can be romantic and kinky at the same time, and there’s nothing wrong with it, many of us are.

Leave a Comment