Friday, August 18. 2006

Surfing for the right (geographical) word

Lee Gomes, technology writer for the Wall Street Journal, recently had the opportunity to explore a large database of key word searches that AOL had released to the general public. Using the 2.27 gigabytes worth of data, he determined the most commonly used word that people use for web searches. Excluding prepositions and conjunctions, "free" was tops on the list. But going a bit deeper, and excluding proper nouns, the next most popular word searches included the following: "lyrics," "county," "school," "city," "home," "state," "pictures," "music," "sale," "beach," "high,", "map," "center" and "sex."

Of these fourteen words, four are explicity linked to geography (county, city, state, map), and two are implicitly linked (high, center). Throw in "home," and "school" which you could also consider as "implied" references to a location, you have eight of the fourteen words containing some geographical reference. This would imply, taken to its logical extreme, that 57% of all searches are by people looking for the location of something. Do you agree? I'd like to hear your feedback on this.

Comments

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This is pretty interesting! Do you have a WSJ URL for the story?

#1 Alexandre Leroux (Link) on 2006-08-18 11:00 (Reply)

The article appeared in the August 16 issue of the WSJ and I think you have to have a subscription to the online version to get access to the article.

#2 Joe Francica on 2006-08-18 11:37 (Reply)

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