Have you heard about this 62 year old woman whose search results were revealed from AOL due to them publishing them on the internet? I hope people were paying attention, even though AOL stripped names from the results that they published, somebody at the Times was still able to identify her and now her phone is ringing off the hook. I think the woman is still baffled about this herself, but I like the quote she had here:
It's like someone going into your mailbox, looking at your mail and putting it back. If someone did that, they would go to jail.
If anything this whole AOL thing should make us realize that we're not as anonymous as we think we are online. I'm not saying that's necessarily a bad thing, I just think that we need to pay a little bit more attention to what these companies are doing with our information...that's all. It also should be an indicator as to how personal searching is. I love this Slate article in response to the AOL thing and how people search...the numbers junkie side of my personality loves this stuff too, so I do see some good in what AOL did...albeit still scary...
The article lists the seven ways that people search the web. I actually think there's some good usability insight in here. Quotes underneath are from the article:
1. The Pornhound - People use the internet to surf porn...big surprise. What was interesting is how they plotted it by time of day.
Some users are on a quest for pornography at all hours, seeking little else from AOL. Another subgroup, including No. 927, search only within reliable time slots. The data doesn't list each user's time zone, but 11 p.m. Eastern and 11 p.m. Pacific appear to be prime time for porn on AOL's servers. 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.
2. The Manhunter - People that use the internet to find other people. Time also shows an interesting trend here:
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. Maybe these folks are background-checking job candidates, maybe they're looking up the new cutie at the office, or maybe they just miss old friends.
3. The Shopper - Um, people are just strange...I think the guy who looked up food brands and then asian movie stars might be scarier than the porn people.
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. My favorite specimen is the guy who mostly looked up food brands like Dole, Wendy's, Red Lobster, and Turkey Hill, with an occasional break for "asian movie stars." How much more American could America Online get?
4. The Obsessive - Wow, give it up people...or go visit a library instead ;)
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—that suggests a user who can't let go of one topic, whether it's Judaism, real estate, or Macs. Obsessives are most likely to craft advanced search terms like "craven randy fanfic -wes" and "pfeffern**sse."
5. The Omnivore - Ok, this is probably more my category than anything...
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.
6. The Newbie - The more I work in a library, the less I become surprised by these people...these are the that I have to help on the computers all the time. I don't think I can count the number of times that I've told people that you should really put spaces in between their search terms when using Google when I was helping them out on the computers.
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 searching for "www.google." Other AOLers type their searches without spaces between the words ("newcaddillacdeville") as if they were 1990s-era AOL keywords.
7. The Basket Case - Probably the most interesting category of people...
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.
Tags: aol, aol search, searching, search, keywords, searchers
