Introduction
Paul Boutin, of the Log File analysis company (?) Splunk, uses Splunk to parse the AOL search data and boils down searches to 7 different types: Pornhound, Manhunter, Shopper, Obsessive, Omnivore, Newbie, and the Basket Case. You can perform your own queries here.
Commentary (as this posting is off-tangent to the purpose of this blog)
While people always say tracking a person’s every search is an online marketer dream, I think the AOL search data proves not only the high amount of “noise”, but its just plain creepy. ValleyWag covers some very creepy and tragic searches done by who otherwise probably pass as “normal” people.
Boutin’s article (while not a serious research) does much to humanizes the notion of search term analysis. Looking at the “Basket Case” searches, one realizes that people use search not just to find information or products, but at times like a modern “He (She) Loves Me, He (She) Loves Me Not” game or a modern magic 8-ball.
Excerpt of the Seven Search Types (Original Source)
The Pornhound. Big surprise, there are millions of searches for mind-bendingly kinky stuff. User No. 927 is already an Internet legend—click here if you’re not faint of heart (and not at the office)….The Manhunter. The person who searches for other people. Again, I used Splunk’s “Show Events by Time” function to plot name searches by date and time. Surprisingly, I didn’t uncover many long-term stalkers. Most of the data showed bursts of searches for a specific name only once, all within an hour or a day, and then never again…
The Shopper. The user who hits “treo 700″ 37 times in three days. Here, the data didn’t confirm my biases. I’d expected to find window shoppers who searched for Porsche Cayman pages every weekend. But AOL’s logs reveal that searches for “coupons” are a lot more common….
The Obsessive. The guy who searches for the same thing over and over and over. Looking at the search words themselves can obfuscate a more general long-term pattern—A, A, A, A, B, A, A, C, A, D, A…
The Omnivore. Many users aren’t obsessive—they’re just online a lot. My taxonomy fails them, because their search terms, while frequent, show little repetition or regularity…
The Newbie. They just figured out how to turn on the computer. User No. 12792510 is one of many who confuses AOL’s search box with its browser address window—he keeps seaching for “www.google.”…The Basket Case. In college I had to write a version of the classic ELIZA program, a pretend therapist who only responds to your problems (”I am sad”) with more questions (”Why do you say you are sad?”). AOL Search, it seems, serves the same purpose for a lot of users. I stumbled across queries like “i hate my job” and “why am i so ugly.” For me, one log entry stands above the rest: “i hurt when i think too much i love roadtrips i hate my weight i fear being alone for the rest of my life.” Me too, 3696023. Me too.
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