Alexa two year study.

[Brett_Tabke]

Alexa studied [alexaresearch.com] searches for two years and came these conclusions:

- users are befuddled by internet navigation,
- the #1 search term is sex.
- the practice of entering a domain name in a search box to find a site is still common

and the top search words were:
1.sex (0.3289%)
2.hotmail/hotmail.com/www.hotmail.com (0.2131%)
3.yahoo/yahoo.com/www.yahoo.com (0.2044%)
4.porn/porno/pornography (0.1402%)
5.chat/chatrooms (0.1233%)
6.mp3 (0.0935%)
7.horoscopes/horoscope (0.0800%)
8.ebay/ebay.com/www.ebay.com (0.0731%)
9.aol/aol.com/www.aol.com (0.0714%)
10.games (0.0659%)
11.map/maps (0.0585%)
12.pokemon (0.0549%)
13.nude/nudes (0.0541%)
14.music (0.0505%)
15.xxx (0.0473%)
16.travel (0.0470%)
17.screensaver/screensavers (0.0458%)
18.lyrics/song lyrics (0.0455%)
19.playboy (0.0430%)
20.free (0.0426%)

Two years mining the net, invading peoples privacy, wasting terrabytes of bandwitch, and that is all they have to say? They could have saved their money - I bet half our users could have built the list and conclusions above two years ago.

[WebRookie]

No kidding, pretty useless.

[msgraph]

I could never comprehend the hotmail.com and yahoo.com being some of the most searched for terms. They have been near the top for ages.

Could that be from "certain" AOL and MSN users not knowing how to use the address bar?

[grnidone]

I would think that searches may have changed since the beginning of this project. Two years in internet is a *long* time. How can the research be valid over that long of time?
-G

[rencke]

Brett: This sort of stuff makes good copy though and newspapers go for it. If you'd like some really big and free publicity for yourself or PHP all you have to do is to use stuff from the Metaspy.

I gave a reporter some tidbits from my own keyword mining and the story covered a full page in a major business daily. The angle they found was that Nokia is searched four times more often than Ericsson and gave that a huge headline.

Edited by: rencke