neyo

I am not really one, to rehash stuff I read around the really, but I enjoy writing, and to my knowledge, nothing interesting enough happened today to give me reason to blog. Regardless of that, it doesn’t mean I haven’t read anything funny or interesting, and this article, I think is quite interesting/amusing…

Basically, AOL released some search data on something like 650k of members. Since then, the data has been played with, by a host of companies, and organizations with all kinds of crazy and funny results. This article offers ideas behind search results, and pigeon holes users into 7 categories, based upon the results… They make an interesting read…

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.

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.

The Obsessive. The guy who searches for the same thing over and over and over.

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?”).

I particularly like the Newbie, I’ve dealt with people like this, time after time, some people ought not try to use computers! The Basket Case is the best though, I can imagine people doing this. Read the full article for the full extracts of search classes, the author is pretty funny, especially about ‘the basket case’. Maybe though, all this is worthless, given that it stems from AOL Search. I mean, what demographic uses AOL Search anyhow? It pains me to think of the answer…
Click here for the full article.