Older Adults and Social Media, Mary Madden PewInternet (Aug 27)
Older adults (over 50) in the United States have been adopting the new social networking tools. One in five (20%) are now using twitter, facebook or similar tool, daily.
* Between April 2009 and May 2010, social networking use among internet users ages 50-64 grew by 88%--from 25% to 47%. * During the same period, use among those ages 65 and older grew 100%--from 13% to 26%. * By comparison, social networking use among users ages 18-29 grew by 13%—from 76% to 86%.
Privacy should go hand in hand with transparency , Don Tapscott, Globe and Mail (Aug
Chew on this for a while - "At Zeitgeist, Google CEO Eric Schmidt noted that between the dawn of civilization and 2003, five quintillion bytes of data were collected. Today, the same amount is collected every two days. "
And a lot of that data is about us. Don Tapscott warns we've gone too far.
"Information privacy is the foundation of a free society, and not just because of the harm that can occur from blackmail, identity fraud, impersonation, cyber-stalkers and nosy employers. When data can be assembled into profiles, matched with other info and used to make automated judgments and decisions about individuals, such as whether or not to hire them, whether to admit entry, whether to calculate benefits or terms of an offer, whether to corroborate a claim, whether to discriminate against or manipulate, it should make us shudder to think about what it would be like to live in a world where all is known and nothing is forgotten. "
The End of Online Privacy, Susan Karshinsky and Omar El Akkad, Globe and Mail (Aug 13)
The San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation has proof that we divulge far too much - and most of the time we don't know it.
"The most alarming result of the study of more than 470,000 Web surfers is that 83.6 per cent of them had an instantly identifiable, totally unique fingerprint: Their particular combination of settings and information was unlike that of any other user, increasing the chance they could be personally identified, even though they had done nothing but make a few clicks of the mouse. "
"Put it all together with the constant availability impelled by texting, tweeting, cellphones and status updates – and you have a culture on a path to near-total transparency, a see-through society that may be past the point when it could ever cover back up. "
Millennials will make online sharing in networks a lifelong habit , Lee Rainie, Pew Internet (Jul 9)
Millennials aren't afraid of the Internet's memory.
"Tech experts generally believe that today’s tech-savvy young people – the ‘digital natives’ who are known for enthusiastically embracing social networking – will retain their willingness to share personal information online even as they get older and take on more responsibilities. Experts surveyed say that the advantages Millennials see in personal disclosure will outweigh their concerns about their privacy."
Mobile Access 2010 . Aaron Smith, Pew Internet (Jul 7)
Cell phones aren't just for talking. Some of us may need to get with the program and buy a new super dooper phone.
The use of non-voice data applications on cell phones has grown dramatically over the last year. Compared with a similar point in 2009, cell phone owners are now more likely to use their mobile phones to:* Take pictures—76% now do this, up from 66% in April 2009
* Send or receive text messages—72% vs. 65%
* Access the internet—38% vs. 25%
* Play games—34% vs. 27%
* Send or receive email—34% vs. 25%
* Record a video—34% vs. 19%
* Play music—33% vs. 21%
* Send or receive instant messages—30% vs. 20%
Google Back Above 72% Market Share: Hitwise by Matt McGee, Search Engine Land (Jun 21)
Hitwise always shows more favourable market share numbers that Comscore. For May 2010, that is now 72% for Google in the US. But be mindful that these numbers can be manipulated - and some of Google's share may be people entering the url in the search box instead of the address bar.
Neighbors Online by Aaron Smith, Pew Internet (Jun 9, 2010)
Americans are using more online connections to learn about what's happening in their community.
In a poll conducted at the end of last year, we asked about online connections to communities and neighbors and found that in the twelve months preceding our survey:* 22% of all adults (representing 28% of internet users) signed up to receive alerts about local issues (such as traffic, school events, weather warnings or crime alerts) via email or text messaging.
* 20% of all adults (27% of internet users) used digital tools to talk to their neighbors and keep informed about community issues.
I know of a neighbourhood in Seattle that stays connected through email with updates on break-ins - complete with Google map.
People in the US do have some good neighbourhood tools - such as Everyblock with information on real estate, fires, restaurants and much else.
Google share of searches at 71 percent for April 2010, Hitwise (May 5)
Hitwise shows Google share of US searches at 71.40% - taking a bit from everyone but especially Ask.com (now 2.18%)
Search engines are the primary way for web users to get the information they want from industry sectors Automotive, Health, SHopping, and Travel. 41% of traffic to health verticals comes from the three major search engines (google, yahoo, bing), 36% travel, 27% shopping, and 30% automotive.
Internet use in Canada continues to grow: StatsCan, CP via Globe and Mail (May 10)
More Canadians are using the Internet, but there are still significant differences according to age group, income, and urban vs rural.
"A new study says 80 per cent of Canadians aged 16 and older, or 21.7 million people, used the Internet for personal reasons last year."
+ The vast majority (94 per cent) of people from households with incomes of $85,000 or more used the Internet, compared with 56 per cent among households with incomes of $30,000 or less. "
+ In 2009, 98 per cent of people aged 16 to 24 went online, up slightly from 96 per cent two years earlier.
+ Many more peple 45 and older are using the Internet - now at 66%.
+ Use by people 10 to 24 was 98%
+ Urban (cities over 10,000) 83%. In smaller places, 73%
Government Online - Aaron Smith, Pew Internet (Apr 27)
In the United States governments are making data more available, and the public is using it.
"The report also finds that 31% of online adults have used social tools such as blogs, social networking sites, and online video as well as email and text alerts to keep informed about government activities. "
Would be nice to know what is happening in Canada. We don't have anything like Data.gov to help us find government materials. My guess is that Statistics Canada is the most progressive in using social tools.
Yahoo's search model developing a new face, SF Chronicle (Apr 29)
Yahoo, having just come to an agreement to outsource web search to Microsoft, is investigating other ways of navigation and search that involve social networking, and location aware models.
Yahoo noted in its studies that less time is being spent in traditional web search - "It found that people only spend about one-sixth of their online time performing searches. That compares with half of their time for browsing and one-third for communicating, according to aggregated data pulled from the Yahoo Toolbar, a downloadable browser feature that provides quick links to a user's favorite content."
Two areas of interest are social media - especially Twitter and what it indicates for popular interest, and using images to refine results.
More detail in Yahoo Study Shows Search Responsible for 1 in 5 Pageviews Online, SEO by the SEA (Apr 28)
"This study tells us that 8 days of Yahoo toolbar data, collecting the browsing activity of a large number of people, indicates that searches of the Web, multimedia, and items take up about 10 percent of all pages viewed online, and those search starting points lead to another 11 percent of pages viewed on the Web. "
There is also a breakdown of the type of web search - "They noticed that about 50 percent of queries refered directly to some kind of specific item or object, that 8.5 percent were about some broad topic or concept, and smaller percentages of searches included things like searches for URLs of pages and for navigational queries that didn’t include URLs but were aimed at bringing searchers to specific pages."
In March, more searches took place on Google’s non-search products than Google.com itself., by Brad McCarty, The Next Web (Apr 13)
Total searches in the US in March 2010 reached 15.4 billion with Google sites handling 10 million. Data came from comScore qSearch, which in its press release had even more startling figures. Comscore shows Google had 10 million and You Tube and Other Google at 3.7 million.
Facebook, EBay, and Craigslist are all very strong too at about .6 million.
Canadians' Internet use exceeds TV time by Iain Marlow, Globe and Mail (March 22)
"The average online Canadian now spends more time on the Internet than watching television, according to a new survey from Ipsos Reid, a shift in digital habits that reflects the increasing prevalence of computers in our lives. "
But what are people doing online? This might be time spent that used to be spent in reading newspapers, talking on the phone (now using Skype), being in Facebook, writing emails (the older folks), or looking for a recipe or home remedy. Some might be watching video - a direct substitute for television - but to do that comfortably means setting up a tv-like room.
“It can be kind of confusing when we try and set these media up against each other,” said Sidney Eve Matrix, a media professor at Queen's University. “If you're trying to separate time spent on the Internet from time spent watching television, that's a bit misleading... The Internet is a multimedia world. We consume our newspapers on the Web.”
Social Media and Young Adults , Pew Internet (Feb 3)
"Two Pew Internet Project surveys of teens and adults reveal a decline in blogging among teens and young adults and a modest rise among adults 30 and older. In 2006, 28% of teens ages 12-17 and young adults ages 18-29 were bloggers, but by 2009 the numbers had dropped to 14% of teens and 15% of young adults. During the same period, the percentage of online adults over thirty who were bloggers rose from 7% blogging in 2006 to 11% in 2009. "
Explain This: One-Word Searches Up 17% in 2009, Matt McGee, Small Business Search Marketing (Feb 14)
For years, statistics have shown that searchers are gradually using more words in a query. Suddenly Hitwise produces figures that show the opposite.
"According to their user tracking, one-word searches jumped by 17% in 2009, while longer searches were generally down."
Why - search suggestions? or more use of broad one-word queries because the search engines are getting better at guessing intent?
Survey: Only 42% Of Americans Have Googled Themselves, Matt McGee, Search Engine Land (Jan 28)
Vanity search is essential, but only 42% of Americans have done so. But HR recruiters certainly run searches on applicants.
"More than three-quarters of the recruiters and HR professionals surveyed say they research job candidates via search engines, and more than half use a variety of social media sites"
Four in ten seniors go online , PEW Internet (Jan 13)
Seniors over 65 are less likely to go online and when they do it is for the basics of email and web search.
" As of December 2009, 38% of U.S. adults age 65 and older go online, a significantly lower rate of internet adoption than the general population (74%) and even the next-oldest group (70% of adults age 50-64 years old go online).
In addition, just 26% of U.S. adults age 65 and older have home broadband access, compared with 56% of adults age 50-64 years old (and 60% of all adults)."
Search Engine Use Behavior of Students and Faculty: User perceptions and implications for future search, by Oya Y. Rieger, First Monday ) Dec 7
Generally speaking people are satisfied with search results from search engines in spite of feeling overloaded with information.
"We conclude that, although there are variations in search engine use among the faculty, graduate and undergraduate students surveyed, there is convergence in means of overall satisfaction with the outcomes of their searches and trust in search engines in supporting their studies and research. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications of the findings for future search engine research and information practitioners."
ReadWriteWeb's Best Products of 2009, Read Write Web (Dec)
Read Write Web has begun its compilation of the 10 best products for 2009 in several categories:
+ Mobile web
+ Comsumer web
+ Semantic web (Or structured data)
+ Internation web
+ RSS and syndication
+ Enterprise
+ Internet of things (devices often with RFID technology)
+ Real-time technologies
Social tools and science, Lorcan Demsey, OCLC (Nov 15)
The way we work and relate online really is changing - and if we haven't adopted these new tools, we should soon. This post picks up on a list of social tools being used in the scientific community - part of "open science". They include social bookmarking for reference (connotea), share and discover (Mendeley), threaded discussion (Friend Feed), social networks, wikis, YouTube.
Archiving Web Shortcuts: Internet Archive Launches 301Works.Org , Barbara Quint, Newsbreaks (Dec 7)
What happens to the links when a company that shortens urls for us goes bust?
"To the rescue comes the Internet Archive (www.archive.org) with its backing of a new service called 301Works.org (www.301works.org). Boyd explained the origin of the initiative. "Originally there was a working group of shortening companies. I was involved indirectly. We were discussing how an archive should be configured to help users. In the midst of this, the Internet Archive got involved. They said they would be happy to do the archiving and asked me to be director. It moved from the original group to a set of principles and an agreement version which lets us upload pairings. c is an initiative of the Internet Archive, as well as being a working group of the companies participating.""
Social Isolation and New Technology, by Keith Hampton, Lauren Sessions, Eun Ja Her, Lee Rainie, PEW Internet (Nov 4, 2009)
This is reassuring news - especially in contrast to the view that people using the Internet as a new source lean to limited engagement outside of their beliefs and biases.
"This Pew Internet Personal Networks and Community survey finds that Americans are not as isolated as has been previously reported. People’s use of the mobile phone and the internet is associated with larger and more diverse discussion networks. And, when we examine people’s full personal network – their strong and weak ties – internet use in general and use of social networking services such as Facebook in particular are associated with more diverse social networks."
Tweet This: 19 Percent of Internet Users Use Twitter, Search Engine Watch (Oct 28)
PEW Internet survey found that almost 1 in 5 internet users "use Twitter or another service to share updates about themselves, or to see updates about others. "
That 20% tend to be social networking site users, mobile Internet users, and adults under age 44 - and they have lots of internet-connected devices.
The Web at 40: How the world got wired by Omar El Akkad, Globe and Mail (Oct 29)
Capsule accounts of what was happening on the Internet decade by decade to the present.
Connectivity figures are the most dramatic - "This decade alone, the number of computers on the Net has soared from about 93 million to 700 million. "
Note the number of users by language: 478.7 million English, 361.3 million Chinese - and roughly another 380 million in other languages. Project this a couple of years to see Chinese as the largest language group, and growth in English language users dropping.
Pew Survey Finds Nearly 20 Percent of Online Americans Tweet by Tony Bradley, PCWorld (Oct 21)
That high!
"A new report from the Pew Internet & American Life Project claims that 19 percent, or nearly 1 in 5, Americans who use the Internet also use Twitter or some other social networking status update service to keep in touch and share information about themselves with others. The bigger news is that this figure is almost double what it was in a previous survey in December of 2008."
"Twitter or some other social networkng status update service" means Facebook. There is a key difference between the two.
"One thing that sets Twitter apart from Facebook though is the ability to send and receive status updates via SMS text messaging. Web-enabled mobile phones can access Facebook, Twitter, or other status update services. These services also provide apps for devices like the iPhone and Windows Mobile phones. But, Twitter stands alone in that tweets can be sent via text messaging, and users can designate specific users to have the tweets sent to their mobile phone via text messaging. The 140-character limitation of Twitter tweets lends itself well to text messaging."
See PEW report - Twitter and Status Updating, Fall 2009
Web surfing boosts brain circuitry in older adults by Lesley Ciarula Taylor, Toronto Star (Oct 21)
Web searching is good for your brain.
"The University of California (Los Angeles) research delivered two notable results: Neophyte Web users between the ages of 55 and 78 could get new areas of their brains firing to the same levels as Web-savvy older adults in just one week; and that the experienced Web surfers activated even more parts of their brains while online than while reading a book."
45% doesn't know the difference between paid and organic, Search Cowboys (Sep 29)
Can this be true?
"45% of those who use Google cannot see the difference between what is a paid and what is an organic result. 1500 respondents were questioned about these and other topics concerning search marketing in a research performed by dutch company First Focus and ValueWait. "
This was a study done by a Dutch firm and was presumably limited to Dutch users. People tend to click only on organic (72%), only use Google (63.8%), trust Google's results (80%).
Twitter: It Really is All About You, Sharon Gaudin, Computerworld via PC World (Oct 3)
New study of tweets shows once again that Twitterers aren't talking about anything important - their tweets are mainly about themselves. But some (about 20%) do post informational messages - these people "tend to have larger social networks and interact more with their followers."
There is also potential for more serious or intentional use of twittering.
"Astronauts used Twitter to communicate from space, tweets have been issued from the White House, and Twitter turned into something of a lifeline for the people of Iran during the recent government crackdown over disputed elections there."
The Internet as a Diversionby Aaron Smith, PewInternet (Sep 10, 2009)
Anyone who has wandered off online following interesting articles or watching cat videos knows that the Internet is a diversion.
"Three-quarters of online economic users--those Americans who use the internet to keep up with news about the economic recession or their own personal finances--go online to relax and take their minds off of the recession, according to an April 2009 survey by the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project."
About half of all online users relax with online videos and music.
50 Best Websites 2009 - collection from Time. Or read the full list. List tells us a lot about what people do on the Web today - social, retail, entertainment, travel and some information (WIkipedia).
Timeline of Search Engine History by Loren Baker, Search Engine Journal (Sept 15)
This might be memory lane for some - otherwise I don't know who really cares about search engine history - or even if they should care. But this history starts in 1957 with the Internet itself.
Mining the Web for Feelings, Not Facts by ALex Wright, New York Times, (Aug 23)
Sentiment analysis - the new buzz word for a type of research - and it's growing thanks to all the sentiment and opinion to be found in blogs and tweets and other social media.
"The rise of blogs and social networks has fueled a bull market in personal opinion: reviews, ratings, recommendations and other forms of online expression. For computer scientists, this fast-growing mountain of data is opening a tantalizing window onto the collective consciousness of Internet users."
Happy birthday Internet, welcome to your mid-life crisis by Anick Jesdanun, AP via Globe and Mail (Sep 1)
The Internet began 40 years ago as a way for researchers to share data. In the 1990s the Web brought content, and in very short order many new and easy ways to communicate online. Today, it's a way of life for millions of people. But there are problems that have lead to controls and barriers - and these might slow innovation.
Video piece to this article presents a quick history and points of concern. Fun to see the old dial-up telephone coupler.
Search: Google rules, Europeans do it more by Tom Krazit, CNet (Aug 31)
Google definitely rules -- Comscore figures show that Google carries 67.5% of search use - and search itself is up 41% over July 2008.
Yahoo sites were a distant second with 7.8% of share.
"ComScore came out with worldwide search market share numbers Monday, which revealed that Internet searches increased by 41 percent to 113 billion in just the month of July. Slightly more than two-thirds of all those searches were done with Google, which also saw the number of searches done with through engine increase 58 percent compared with last year."
The Audience for Online Video-Sharing Sites Shoots Up. Pew Internet (August)
Has anyone NOT watched video from a video-sharing site? This is how we get our information now.
"The audience for online video sharing sites like YouTube and Google Video continues to grow swiftly across all demographic groups, far outpacing the adoption rates of many other internet activities. Fully 62% of adult internet users have watched a video on these sites, up from just 33% who reported this in December 2006. Online video watching among young adults is near-universal; nine in ten (89%) internet users ages 18-29 now say they watch content on video sharing sites, and 36% do so on a typical day."
Resources of the Week: Internet and Social Networking Stats by Shirl Kennedy, ResourceShelf (Aug 3)
Resources with statistics about the Internet - broadband, size, social networking, demographics.
The Internet and the Recession by Lee Rainie, Aaron Smith, Pew Internet (Jul 15, 2009)
Many have turned to the Internet for information to help them cope with bad economic times whether for jobs, investments, advice, or bargains.
This study found that:
"Some 69% of all Americans have used the internet to cope with the recession as they hunt for bargains, jobs, ways to upgrade their skills, better investment strategies, housing options, and government benefits. That amounts to 88% of internet users. "
"The internet ranks high among sources of information and advice that people are seeking during hard times, especially when it comes to their personal finances and economic circumstances. Broadband users are particularly likely to use the internet more than some other sources. At the same time, broadcast media outpace the internet as sources of news about national economics and broadcast sources still overshadow the internet among all Americans for information and advice related to their personal financial circumstances."
People consult several sources - other people, media, and active search.
Report lists the uses. Surprisingly, only 3% used the internet to get information about filing for bankruptcy. Forty percent were looking for online coupons - they are still spending.
Iran: the Twitter revolution? - Globe and Mail discussion on June 17.
"Iran's biggest mass protest since 1979 has become a global cyber-movement, fought on and fuelled by the Web and social-media tools like Twitter. Matt Hartley, Omar El Akkad and Mathew Ingram discuss the implications of that phenomenon."
Analysis, examples, comment - rich discussion on people's use of Twitter to report on events as they unfold.
Referred to - Q&A with Clay Shirky on Twitter and Iran - a TED event.
"He revealed how cellphones, the web, Facebook and Twitter had changed the rules of the game, allowing ordinary citizens extraordinary new powers to impact real-world events. As protests in Iran exploded over the weekend, we decided to rush out his talk, because it could hardly be more relevant. "
The Social Life of Health Information, by Susannah Fox, Sydney Jones. PEW Internet (June 11)
Americans certainly use the web for researching health matters (61%) and 60% of those have accessed some form of user-generated health information - blog, reviews, podcasts.
"This Pew Internet/California HealthCare Foundation survey finds that technology is not an end, but a means to accelerate the pace of discovery, widen social networks, and sharpen the questions someone might ask when they do get to talk to a health professional. Technology can help to enable the human connection in health care and the internet is turning up the information network’s volume."
Some key findings:
+ 61% of adults look online for health information.
+ 60% of e-patients (37% of adults) have accessed or created user-generated health information online.
+ 41% have read someone else's commentary or experience about health or medical issues on an online news group, website, or blog.
+ 22% of e-patient social networking site users have followed their friends' personal health experiences or updates on the site.
+ 12% of e-patient Twitterers have posted comments, queries, or information about health or medical matters.
Therefore, while there is interest in reading accounts by others, there is reluctance to write about one's own.
Hitwise Intelligence - Heather Hopkins - North America, Hitwise (May 27)
Canadians do search engines, social networking, and entertainment online.
"The largest category in Canada, based on share of Internet visits is Search Engines. Hitwise categorises websites into over 165 industry categories.Search Engines came out on top, capturing 14.58% of Canadian Internet visits in April, followed by Social Networking and Forums and Entertainment."
Google Creeps Toward 73% of US Searches in April, Marketing Vox news ( May 11)
How high can Google go in market share? Hitwise now says "72.74% of all US searches conducted in the four weeks ending April 25, 2009".
Also - search queries are getting longer -- "Search queries of five to more than eight words in length have increased 7% between April 2008 and April 2009. Searches of eight or more words increased 18%. The same time period showed that shorter search queries - those averaging one to four words long - have decreased 2%:"
3 Models of Value in the Real Time Web, by Marshall Kirkpatrick, Read Write Web (May 8)
Real-Time Web has arrived. Facebook and Twitter helped it happen. We are plugged in constantly to friends, news, updates.
Marshall Kirkpatrick proposes that there are "three models of value": Ambiance, Automation and Emergence.
+ Ambiance: finding related activities going on anywhere on the Web - do this through a streaming set of results on anything.
+ Automation: robot works for you monitoring changes
+ Emergence: what's hot - gives the example of Postrank
"for example, Postrank has discovered that a Google Blogsearch search result about Oregon State University has received two comments and one inbound link. That's an unusually high amount of activity lately on that topic, Postrank says."
We've had change monitoring and custom search for some time, but combined with rss feeds, smarter robots, and mobile phones - we really are in real-time.
The Evolution of the Internet, PCWorld (May)
This slideshow tells the story of the Internet beginning from its days as Arpanet in 1969 for the US military, through the time of expanding economic use, the problems of spam, and looking to a future of more growth. 30% of the world's population is now online.
Now closing: GeoCities, a relic of Web's early days, by Stephen Shankland, Webwar (Apr 23)
Times change - goodbye old personal web site at GeoCities and hello blogs, Facebook, MySpace and all things web 2.0. People don't create web sites thru GeoCities anymore - so Yahoo is closing it. This article gives us a glimpse back to 1999 when Yahoo bought the hot GeoCities.
"GeoCities rose to power during an era when publishing on the Internet meant setting up your own Web site. GeoCities simplified the process by helping people sidestep the complications of registering a domain and learning how to program HTML, the language that describes Web pages."
Googling the future; Economic indicators, Economist (Apr 18)
Economists might turn to Google Trends to extract some data about consumer behaviour for econometric models.
"In a new paper written with Hyunyoung Choi, a colleague at Google [of Hal Varian], he argues that fluctuations in the frequency with which people search for certain words or phrases online can improve the accuracy of the econometric models used to predict, for example, retail-sales figures or house sales. Actual numbers for such things are usually available only with a lag. But Google's search data are updated every day, so they can in theory capture shifts in consumer behaviour before official numbers are released." ...
"For example, using data on searches for trucks and SUVs to predict the monthly sales of motor vehicles reduces the average error by up to 18% compared with the predictions from a model that did not incorporate the search data. The volume of searches for Hong Kong carried out in countries like America, Britain, Australia and India also seems to predict eventual tourist arrivals to the territory from these countries rather well."
Lost in the shifting sands of social media. by Ivor Tossell, Globe and Mail (Apr 9)
Cracks showing in Twitter - things can be destroyed through their own popularity.
Things fall apart. Take Twitter. It's over, done with. It's an ex-songbird.I mean, millions of people still use it, and more are signing up. People are rushing to the service, especially if they have something they'd like to sell you. But the people who drew me to it just aren't posting much any more. The new joiners, who mostly seem to be self-promoters of some variety, aren't the people I want to be talking to. The fertile conversation that made it such an amazing place seems to have faded. The spark is gone. It might be time to pack up and move on.
How Children Search the Internet with Keyword Interfaces: Allison Druin, Elizabeth Foss, Leshell Hatley, Evan Golub, Mona Leigh Guha, Jerry Fails from Human-Computer Interaction Lab, University of Maryland; and Hilary Hutchison, Google (March 2009)
Searching the web is all about words - thinking of them, typing them, reading them - and then making sense of everything. For children this can be daunting and frustrating.
From the abstract:
"This paper presents the findings of our initial study to understand how children ages 7, 9, and 11 search the Internet using keyword interfaces in the home. Our
research has revealed that although today’s children have been exposed to computers for most of their lives, spelling, typing, query formulation, and deciphering results are all still potential barriers to finding the information they need."
The problems that children deal with in using search tools, are really the same many adults do - but have got used to. Even tools that have been developed to help kids - auto complete and spelling suggestions - go ignored.
By the end of this article you may conclude 1) the search interface we live with really is bad - from query to results; and 2) having children use adult tools is not good.
I'm sorry that the study didn't comment on what does work for children. Just guessing, I would think that the Ask.com interface would be friendlier - answers at the top, work in natural language. I have heard that children like the metasearcher kartoo.com because it is visual. Quintura for kids could be a good choice because it is also visual and groups results.
One of the researchers on this project does work for Google. Perhaps this will lead to a Google for Kids someday.
Pew: Young Or Old, Search Cuts Across Age Categories by Greg Sterling (Jan 28)
Figures from The Pew Internet & American Life Project about generations and internet activity (excludes teens).
Full report - Generations Online in 2009
"Contrary to the image of Generation Y as the "Net Generation," internet users in their 20s do not dominate every aspect of online life. Generation X is the most likely group to bank, shop, and look for health information online. Boomers are just as likely as Generation Y to make travel reservations online. And even Silent Generation internet users are competitive when it comes to email (although teens might point out that this is proof that email is for old people)."
What Would Google Do? by Nick Summers, Newsweek (Jan 27)
What would Google Do is the title of Jeff Jarvis' book in which he advises that ".... pretty much everyone—you, your company, entire industries, and the U.S. government—to study and ape the online juggernaut, or risk getting buried"
Has a nice bit in which Jarvis itemizes the way he has used Google in the last 24 hours.
"Oh, can I count them all? My mail is on Google, so every time I've pinged it, I'm on Google. I've searched for news of various sorts; I used Google Maps to find restaurants in Munich, I used Google Maps to get directions; I used Google search to find movie listings, and then I used it to find reviews. I watched a mess of Google videos."
Search Market Share 2008: Google Grew, Yahoo & Microsoft Dropped & Stabilized by Danny Sullivan, Search Engine Land (Jan 26)
All you will want to know about search market share in the US. Reminder that it isn't just about share - there is search volume too - and that is soaring.
"Bottom line? Google grew from a 57%-to-66% estimated share in January 2008 to a 63%-to-72% share by the end of the year. In short, a 6% gain."
"Google went from an estimated 4.5-to-6 billion searches per month in January to a 5-to-8 billion searches in December."
Internet use tops 1 billion worldwide by Luann Lasalle, CP via Globe and Mail (Jan 23)
"ComScore found that more than a billion people aged 15 and older used the Internet from home and work computers around the world in December."
+ Google, Microsoft, Yahoo were the top three visited
+ "The Asia-Pacific region accounted for the highest share of global Internet users at 41 per cent, followed by Europe at 28 per cent and North America at 18 per cent."
+ "Canada was 11th out of 15 countries with a 2.2 per cent share of the total worldwide Internet audience with about 22,000 users reported last December."
+ Access to the Internet on mobile devices will be the next great change. Comscore did not track this but one industry analysts said - "smart phones that allow web surfing will be key in emerging economies and in those that have low Internet use, not personal computers."
Adults and Social Network Websites, PEW Internet (Jan 14)
Thirty-five percent of adults have a profile on an online social network. This was the finding from the Pew Internet & American Life Project's December 2008 tracking survey.
From the press release:
"Still, younger online adults are much more likely than their older counterparts to use social networks, with 75% of adults 18-24 using these networks, compared to just 7% of adults 65 and older. At its core, use of online social networks is still a phenomenon of the young.
Overall, personal use of social networks seems to be more prevalent than professional use of networks, both in the orientation of the networks that adults choose to use as well as the reasons they give for using the applications. Most adults, like teens, are using online social networks to connect with people they already know.
When users do use social networks for professional and personal reasons, they will often maintain multiple profiles, generally on different sites. "
By browsing and searching and in other ways using computers we are adding to carbon emissions. This generally is the conclusion of Dr Alex Wissner-Gross, a physicist from Harvard University, who has estimated the environmental impact of a "typical Google search on a desktop computer" to be about 7 grams of carbon dioxide, a combination of the user's computer and Google's servers. Compare this to boiling an electric kettle which produces 15 grams. Google countered with an estimate of .2 grams of CO2. The truth is somewhere in between. But what are we to do about it - I would forego putting on the kettle if it becomes a choice between a cup of tea and a web search.
There is an environmental cost to everything we do, but it would be better if we focused on where we can make big gains in reducing carbon emissions such as in our use of fuel for transportation, heating, and, yes, producing electricity. Raise the price of electricity, and Google will find more ways to reduce its use of it.
Pandia commented on this in - How Google is destroying the world’s climate -- that while it is good to push companies like Google to be more efficient in energy use, "Still, we are starting to feel some unease about stories like this. It is as if this narrow focus on individual types of energy consumption is making us lose sight of the bigger picture." Pandia has other points that makes us question the motives of the authors of the study.
More background and comment in:
Google searches cost the earth, claims academic By Tom Jowitt, Techworld (Jan 12)
Google emits rebuttal to carbon claims by David Meyer, ZDNet UK (Jan 12)
Americans View 34 Percent More Online Videos in November 2008 Compared to Year Ago, Comscore, press release (Jan 5)
In case you wondered what people in the US did in November - "U.S. Internet users viewed 12.7 billion online videos during the month, representing an increase of 34 percent versus year ago."
Canadians use Google to seek what they've already found, study says, by Matt Hartley, Globe and Mail (Dec 10)
Google Canada Zeitgeist is out for 2008. Seems Canadians have been looking for Google itself in Google as some kind of shortcut.
Article doesn't mention that google is #6 in Australia too. Looking at the worldwide Zeitgeist, it's surprising how often YouTube is on the top 10 and sometimes twice as youtube and you tube - and then there are the cases of just you.
See Year End 2008 Zeitgeist for around the World.
Also - 2008 Year-End Google Zeitgeist for all categories for all countries, Canada included.
This may indicate a couple of things: 1) people use the Google search bar (or the toolbar search) instead of the address bar to find sites - Google is just so good at putting the target in first place; and 2) the zeitgeist really doesn't tell us much.
The Zeitgeist also pulls out of the searches the dominant interests over the year. Note the differences in these three English-speaking countries.
Australia: olympians, crises, movies, stores,
UK: politicians, recipes, finance terms, tickets
Canada: political parties (in which all are listed), celebrities (all American except Pamela Anderson), news sources (thank heavens CBC comes before CNN), personal electronic (????)
Google analyzed the United States differently - see that as US Zeitgeist.
Several videos on presentations about search at the World Information Institute Conference - Nov 11, 2008
"Deep Search wants to look at the social and political dimensions of how we navigate the deep seas of knowledge. We want to examine the pursuit of categorizing that data and what it means to relate to the world through digital search technologies. Futuristic applications and computational complexity aside, cognitive technologies deliberately designed to yield results in a limited frame of reference, imbed political philosophy in seemingly neutral code. In the daily reality of information overflow it is crucial to acknowledge both arbitrariness and willful designation, and that hierarchies are not miraculously produced by nature itself. Innocent utilities that blend into the routine of everyday work and leisure subtly bend our perception, and weave threads into the fabric of cognitive reality."
(World-Information Institute)
http://world-information.org/wii/deep_search/en/videos
Are Our Brains Becoming “Googlized?”, by Gord Hotchkiss, Search Engine Land (Nov 14)
Having our brains googlized might not be a bad thing. We might be overusing Google to look up things we can't remember or feel we should know. On the other, searching Google might be keeping the old cortex more limber. Note the word "old". Hotchkiss comments on the brain study done at UCLA into use of the Internet by middle-aged and older adults - where Internet searching was generally beneficial mind-wise. Contrast that Nicholas Carr's article in the Atlantic Monthly entitled “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” and says attention spans are shortening and memory weakening. Which is true or are both? Read Hotchkiss conclusion and form your own opinion.
The Secret Influence of Search Behavior by Kim Krause Berg, Search Engine Land (Oct 31)
New column at Search Engine Land will look at "captology, persuasive web design, user experience and usability topics and how it all ties into the world of search engines, marketing and your every day life."
In a nutshell, the Internet (tools on it, the information, the availability) is causing us to seek out and use information differently.
".. By making more information available online, our habits are changing. We’re teaching one another new tricks and evolving together. We’re sharing more stories by way of social networking. We’re learning new ways for doing the same old things. We’re willing to be talked into most anything, especially if we read it on the web, in an email from a friend or click a search engine result that looks credible."
Study: Google & Web Search Make You Smarter by Matt McGee, Search Engine Land (Oct 14)
"Proving what many of us in the search industry have long suspected, a report today on CNN says searching the web makes you smarter."
And what's great about this finding is that the study was of people older than 55.
CNN story is Study: Google does a brain good
Study was done by Dr Gary Small at University of California, Los Angeles using two groups of people:
"In the study, 24 people were divided into the two groups, who were similar in age ranging from 55 to 78 years old, sex and educational achievement. Their only difference was their technological experience." - one had minimal computer experience and the other was "Web savvy".
"Members of the technologically advanced group had more than twice the neural activation than their less experienced counterparts while searching online. Activity occurred in the region of the brain that controls decision-making and complex reasoning, according to Small's study, which appears in the American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry."
Pew On Networked Workers: Connected, Distracted, Ambivalent, by Greg Sterling, Search Engine Land (Sep 24)
Did Internet and the cell phone change your life? Pew Internet Life looked at "networked workers" - "The data concern use of the internet and mobile devices at work and at home and the bridging of those worlds accordingly. The survey data reflect that these technologies have at once created more flexibility for American workers but also caused ambivalence about their impact on our personal lives."
Report is at http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/264/report_display.asp
Teens, Video Games, and Civics from Pew Internet (Sept 16)
Almost all teens (aged 12 to 17) play virtual games online.
* 97% of American teens ages 12-17 play some kind of video game.
* 99% of boys say they are gamers and 94% of girls report that they play
games.
Most popular types are racing, puzzles, sports, action and adventure. Virtual worlds like Second Life were visited by only 10% of the respondents.
"The five most popular games among American teens are Guitar Hero, Halo 3, Madden NFL, Solitaire, and Dance Dance Revolution. These games include rhythm games (Guitar Hero and Dance Dance Revolution), puzzle/card games (Solitaire), sports games Teens, Video Games, and Civics (Madden), and first-person shooter games (Halo). The ratings of these games range from E-rated “Everyone” games (Solitaire and Dance Dance Revolution), deemed suitable by the ratings board for players of all ages, to games rated Mature (M) for violence, blood and gore, and language (Halo). The range of genres spanned by the most popular games played by teens indicates they are not simply playing violent first-person shooters or action games. However, boys are more likely than girls to report playing these specific violent M-rated games."
Computing In The Cloud: Who Owns Your Files? by Laura Sydell, NPR (Aug 21)
Individuals have stored email online for years, and then photos, and now documents. And companies are doing the same. But there are risks. You could be locked out of the account for any number of reasons. The provider might use your information - who can know since hardly anyone reads the terms of agreement. Or the company can shut down - many have.
Thanks to KM for this story.
Search Engine Use, Pew Internet (Aug 6)
Use of Web for search engines is rising. On a "typical day" 49% use the web for search on a day compared to 60% for email. This is much greater than the 39% for news and the 30% for weather.
"According to a new report from The Pew Internet & American Life Project, daily use of search engines is growing and starting to approach email usage levels. New research conducted by telephone among 2,251 US adults, age 18 and older, found that 49 percent of internet users use a search engine on a typical day, compared with 60 percent for email. "
Search Engines are Preferred Method for Researching Products and Services Search Engine Watch (June 24)
People use search engines to research products to buy - "according to data released by Opinion Research Corporation".
+ "63% of those surveyed say they consult online news, blogs, and consumer feedback before making a purchase. "
+ "70% go online to find information on brands, especially for travel, leisure, and recreation
+ "83% say online reviews had at least some level of influence in their buying decision"
The Future of The Web By Kristina Grifantini, Technology Review (July / August 2008)
Technology Review posed the question - what the Web might be in five to ten years - to seven prominent Web people including Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Vint Cerf. Mixed responses from Sir Tim Berners-Lee's hopes, and Richard Stallman's fears.
How Google ate my brain by MARGARET WENTE, Globe and Mail (June 17)
Very funny and true - where will it lead: "Google has done wondrous things for my stock of general knowledge. It also seems to have destroyed my attention span. Like a flea with ADD, I jump back and forth from the Drudge Report to gardening sites that list the growing time of Green Zebras."
The Internet and the 2008 Election Pew Internet (June 17)
"A record-breaking 46% of Americans have used the internet, email or cell phone text messaging to get news about the campaign, share their views and mobilize others. And Barack Obama's backers have an edge in the online political environment. "
The Center Is Where They Want to Be: Google Friend Connect, Yahoo! Open Strategy, MySpace Data Availability, Facebook Connect by Avi Rappoport, Newsbreaks (May 19)
How far will collection of information about interests and friends and everything else go? How accepting will people be about the creation of these huge archives?
"Google, Yahoo!, MySpace, and Facebook are in competition to be the single archive for user data. As Caroline Dangson of IDC puts it, these initiatives "are really just competitive moves between MySpace, Facebook, Yahoo!, and Google to own user data over the long run." "
The Internet and Consumer Choice: Online Americans use different search and purchase strategies for different goods PEW Internet and American Life (May 18)
From the email:
The internet plays an important role in how people conduct research for
purchases, but it is just one among a variety of sources people use and
usually not the key factor in final purchasing decisions. A new study by
the Pew Internet & American Life Project tracks the decision-making
processes for buying music, purchasing a cell phone, and buying or
renting a home. Here are the top three sources used in product research
for each of the three products.
For those who have bought music in the prior year:
83% say they find out about music from the radio, the television or in a
movie.
64% say they find out about music from friends, family members, or
co-workers.
56% say they find out about music through various online tools, such as
going to a band's or artist's website or streaming samples of songs to
their computers.
Among those who have purchased a cell phone in the prior year:
59% asked an expert or salesperson for advice 46% go to one or more cell
phone stores.
39% use the internet.
For those who have rented or bought new housing in the prior year:
49% use the internet.
49% look through ads in the newspaper.
47% ask a real estate agent for advice.
Even though many buyers use the internet in product research, relatively
few say online information had a major impact on the product choice they
eventually made. Only 7% of music buyers, 10% of cell phone buyers, and
11% of those who bought or rented a home in the prior year say that
online information had a major impact on their decision.
For the full report please visit:
http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/248/report_display.asp
Plus: Senior Research Fellow Deborah Fallows reports from China on how
the earthquake recovery is portrayed on TV and on the internet:
Day 1-4: http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/p/1474/pipcomments.asp
Day 5-7: http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/p/1475/pipcomments.asp
Exploring beyond the toolbar, Alexa overhauls rankings By Caroline McCarthy, CNet via Webware (Apr 17)
Alexa has changed the way it collects web traffic information and rankings from depending only on the installed Alexa toolbar. It now aggregates from many sources.
"Because of the new method of tabulating analytics, Alexa data now goes back only nine months. The company says it is "recalculating historic traffic data and will continue to add it over the coming weeks.""
Others who track web activity are Compete (data used by Ask in the binocular view), Hitwise and Comscore.
comScore Releases Top Canadian Web Rankings for February 2008 Press release (Mar 27)
Here are the February 2008 rankings "of the largest and fastest-growing Internet properties and site categories in Canada based on data from its comScore Media Metrix service".
The fastest growing interests were genealogy, taxes, and sweepstakes. Might there be a connection? Taxes is probably a seasonal interest.
Top 5 properties in February 2008 ranked by unique visitors were (unchanged from January):
Google
Microsoft
Yahoo
Facebook
Ebay
The Internet, These Days by Reid Goldsborough, LinkUP DIgital (Mar 15)
These statistics on Internet use show what people in other countries are doing while online. Email is still the most popular at 97 to 99% in all countries.
Many figures were obtain from the Norton Online Living Report by Symantec.
For usage and populations statistics worldwide see Internet World Stats. December 2007 figures show highest penetration is still in North America at 71% of population, but Oceania / Australia at 57% and Europe at 43% are gaining.
Hitwise: Google Users Older, Bigger Spenders Than Yahoo'sHitwise: Google Users Older, Bigger Spenders Than Yahoo's Greg Sterling, Search Engine Land (Feb 18)
Are you 35 or over and somewhat affluent? Hitwise in a demographic study has found that you are more likely to use Google than Yahoo. You probably spent more online too. Yahoo tends to attract younger users to its services. Wonder how that will match up to Microsoft's user population?
The new weapons in crime fighting: YouTube and Facebook by Timothy Appleby, Globe and Mail (Jan 29)
Toronto Police forces uses YouTube to request information and Facebook for outreach.
"But videotaped calls for help on http://www.youtube.com/1800222TIPS - just one of several police-sponsored web sites - tell only part of the story. Constable Mills [Toronto Crime Stoppers schools officer] also has his own Facebook account, conduit for a flood of comment and feedback from school visits."
Search Atheism On The Rise, Duncan Riley, Tech Crunch (Jan 17)
What do they mean by trust?
"A new study from the University of Southern California’s Center for the Digital Future has found that a growing number of people no longer believe that search results are reliable and accurate."
Highlights - 2008 Digital Future Reportv Final Release from the Center for the Digital Future, Annenberg School for Communication
The report itself isn't so harsh.
+ "Digital Future Report found that the Internet is perceived by users to be a more important source of information for them -- this over all other principal media, including television, radio, newspapers, and books."
+ "46 percent of Internet users said that most or all of the information online is generally reliable -- this compared to 43 percent of non-users who gave the same response."
+ "Steadily increasing percentages of Internet users find high degrees of reliability and accuracy on their favorite Web sites. Eighty-three percent of users said that most or all of the information on Web sites they visit regularly is reliable and accurate -- the same percentage as in 2006 and slightly higher than 81 percent in 2005."
+ About search engine results - "A higher percentage of Internet users reported negative views about the reliability and accuracy of information provided by search engines, such as Google. Slightly over half of Internet users -- 51 percent -- said that most or all of the information produced by search engines is reliable and accurate -- down from the 62 percent who reported the same response in 2006."
Increased Use of Video-sharing Sites PEW Internet and American Life (Jan 9)
This new PEW study shows that not only are many more people watching videos online they are doing so more often.
From the release:
"The Pew Internet & American Life Project has just released findings
showing that 48% of internet users have been to video-sharing sites such
as YouTube and the daily traffic to such sites on a typical day has
doubled in the past year.
The basic findings in a national phone survey that ended in December
show:
48% of internet users said they had ever visited a video-sharing site
such as YouTube. A year ago, in December 2006, 33% of internet users
said they had ever visited such sites. That represents growth of more
than 45% year-to-year.
15% of respondents said they had used a video-sharing site "yesterday" -
the day before they were contacted for our survey. A year ago, 8% had
visited such a site "yesterday." Thus, on an average day, the number of
users of video sites nearly doubled from the end of 2006 to the end of
2007. "
PEW Internet and American Life looked at "How people use the internet, libraries and government agencies when they need help" in the Decemper report on Online Activities and Pursuits
"There are several major findings in this report. One is this: For help with a variety of common problems, more people turn to the internet than consult experts or family members to provide information and resources. "
But they also turn to the library. 53% of Americans used a library in the past year for some kind of purpose (not necessarily to get information on the PEW survey topics), and especially the Gen Y (18 to 29).
See Pew/Internet Study Finds Most Americans Get Their Answers From The Internet by Vanessa Fox, Search Engine Land (Dec 31) for a summary of points.
"Overall, people tend to consult two to three sources for information and are generally satisfied with the results. 77% of internet users (55% of Americans) have high-speed access; whereas 18% are still on dial-up. The speed of access seems to make a big difference in whether a searcher turns to the internet or some other source for answers."
Comments on medical verticals, use of government resources, and libraries.
"Teens and Social Media.", from Pew Internet and American Life (Dec 19)
"Content creation by teenagers continues to grow, with 64% of online teenagers ages 12 to 17 engaging in at least one type of content creation, up from 57% of online teens in 2004."
+ Girls create content - "Some 35% of all teen girls blog, compared with 20% of online boys, and 54% of wired girls post photos online compared with 40% of online boys.
+ Boys do video - "posting of video content online - online teen boys are nearly twice as likely as online girls (19% vs. 10%) to have posted a video online somewhere where someone else could see it."
+ They share and comment - "Nearly half (47%) of online teens have posted photos where others can see them, and 89% of those teens who post photos say that people comment on the images at least "some of the time." Teens who post videos report a similarly large incidence of feedback, with nearly three quarters (72%) of video posters receiving comments on their videos."
+ Social networks are very important - "Social network sites affect teens' lives in other ways beyond providing space for content creation and feedback. For many teens they are now an integral part of the system of communication that they use to conduct the work of their lives. Fully 41% of the teens who use MySpace, Facebook or other social network sites say they send messages to friends via those sites every day."
Stats: Four in Five of All U.S. Adults Go Online; Adult Online Usage Increases 10% Vs. Last Year ResourceShelf (Nov 9)
From the study - "In research among 2,062 U.S. adults surveyed by telephone in July and October, 2007, Harris Interactive found that 79 percent of adults are now online." ... "The average number of hours per week that people are spending online is now at 11 hours, up from 9 hours last year and 8 hours in 2005."
So who’s doing all this searching anyway? by Jeremy Crane, Compete (Nov 7)
Analyzed search use in September 2007 in the United States and ranked individual searchers by the volume of queries.
"In the interest of peeling back another layer in the continuing quest I thought I’d look into exactly who is performing the highest volume of searches on each engine. The beauty of Compete’s people based approach to click stream data is that I can dig into this question without having to worry about things like bots, meta-search, etc. Every search query we see in our data is a query performed by an actual person."
Findings:
+ top 1% of searchers performs a full 13% of all searches in a given month.
+ extrapolated to propose that 70% of searches are done by 20% of searchers.
+ Google might have the greatest concentration of repeat searchers.
Parent and Teen Internet Use PEW/Internet (Oct 24)
"Parents are engaged with their children's media consumption, but have less positive views of the internet today than they did in 2004. A new data memo issued by the Pew Internet and American Life Project based on a telephone survey in October-November 2006 found that 59% of parents think the internet has been a good thing for their children, down from 67% in 2004. "
Report: 7 Out Of 10 Americans Experience 'Search Engine Fatigue' Greg Sterling, Search Engine Land (Oct 23)
A study done for Autobytel by Kelton Research found that "7 out of 10 Americans experience what the report describes as “search engine fatigue.”" Users are frustrated with user the "clutter and the content of search results".
Asia has the most searchers: comScore search study Dianna Dilworth, DMNews (Oct 12)
Figures from Comscore qSearch service on internet use and searching.
+ searchers run an average of 80 searches each in August 2007. (750 million people ran 61 billion searches)
+ Asia-Pacific 258 million unique searchers, avg 78.7 searches / person
+ Europe 210 million, avg 85.7
+ North America 206 million avg 77.7
+ Latin America avg 95
+ Google was used most. "Google sites ranked as the top worldwide search property in August with 37.1 billion searches conducted. Of that total, 31 billion occurred at the Google search engine and 5 billion occurred at YouTube.com. Yahoo sites ranked second with 8.5 billion searches, while Baidu.com, a Chinese language search engine, followed in third place with more than 3.2 billion searches. Microsoft sites ranked fourth worldwide, while Korea's NHN Corp., which owns Naver.com, ranked fifth with 2 billion searches worldwide."
The 16 Greatest Moments in Web History Dan Tynan, PCWorld (Oct 11)
Memory lane - some big moments here - starting with Tim Berners Lee in December 1990 - "On Christmas morning 1990, Tim Berners Lee and Robert Cailliau of the CERN research lab in Geneva communicated with the world's first Web server--presenting all of us with a Christmas gift that keeps on giving."
New Yahoo! Search Makes Web Search Effortless for Consumers, BusinessWire via Marketwatch (Oct 2)
Of interest: "Recent research conducted by Harris Interactive on behalf of Yahoo! on the state of the Web shows that consumers are suffering from "Web search fatigue." The study revealed that while 99 percent of online adults use a search engine to find information on the Internet, a mere 15 percent of them find what they're looking for with their first search, with most needing to conduct three to four searches."
10 More Future Web Trends by Richard MacManus, Read/Write Web (Sept 25)
More thoughts about web trends sent in by readers of the Read/Write Web blog.
+ Integration into everyday devices. The fridge is mentioned.
+ Hyperlocal - social, geo-tagging, maps etc
+ Data retrieval and manipulation - (hoping for Hal?)
+ Read/Write/Request Web - an agent of sorts
+ User controlled, open Internet identity
+ Extended reality - look to science fiction
+ Expert systems
+ Personalized medicine
+ Blog reading automatically input into our brain - (good question - how are we going to handle the glut of information?)
Google keeps top search spot in August, AP via Business Week (Sept 20)
New figures for August 2007 from Nielsen Net Ratings on market share and number of searches show Google continuing to have stunning growth, MSN/Live recovering some share, and Ask.com not growing in spite of all the TV ads.
: "The report, issued late Wednesday, estimated Google captured 53.6 percent of the U.S. online search market during August with about 4.2 billion searches. This represents growth of 39.8 percent year over year, and is also an increase over Google's estimated 53.3 percent share of the market in July."
+ Yahoo 19.9% share, 8.9% growth
+ MSN/Live 12.9% share, 69.8% growth
+ AOL 5.6% share, 34.2% growth
+ Ask 1.7% share, no growth
Hobbyists Online, PEW Internet and American Life (Sept 20)
No surprise here - people use the Internet to pursue their hobbies.
"The Pew Internet Project's latest report finds that the internet has become a
hobbyist's playground. A telephone survey conducted in February-March 2007
found that fully 83% of online Americans say they have used the internet to
seek information about their hobbies and 29% do so on a typical day. Looking
for information about hobbies is among the most popular online activities, on
par with shopping, surfing the web for fun, and getting news."
Just in case you missed it, PC Magazine had an article on Web 3.0 in March 2007 - Web 3.0 - The Internet is Changing Again - by Cade Metz.
Web 2.0 was "any site, service, or technology that promoted sharing and collaboration right down to the Net's grass roots". Web 3.0 could be many things - it's just the next stage.
+ Semantic Web - better connections between blocks of information such that the software can anticipate what you really want to know or do. Blue Organizer from AdaptiveBlue (www.adaptiveblue.com) is one example - read about a film and immediately link to a lot of related content and services.
+ 3D Web - really virtual worlds - and the possibilities that presents for new ways of living online
+ Media-centric web - find media from media - find pictures that look like or are about the same topic as one you provide. This exists today at Live.com and is used for shopping (of course).
+ Pervasive web - everything is connected even the windows in your house.
Search In The Year 2010: Part Two by Gord Hotchkiss, Search Engine Land (Sep 7)
Gord Hotchkiss interviewed many of the influential people in search a few weeks ago. This is part two of his account of their views - "looking at mobile, what advertising might look like on the search results page, will banner blindness rear it’s head on the SERP, how our interactions might change and some bold predictions for the future."
Much of the discussion is about advertising, but there are some projections about the design of the search results page. Ask has led in innovation with its 3-D presentation. Chris Sherman says that Ask is the Apple of search. Microsoft has done interesting work with images. Google has stayed spartan even with universal search, but it may develop two interfaces: one for the power user and the other for the general user.
It becomes more futuristic with predictions of touch displays, and searching in a virtual world.
10 Future Web Trends by Richard MacManus, Read / Write Web (Sep 6)
MacManus gives a time frame of 10 years for these changes, but I think some will be well developed in the next 5.
+ Semantic Web for making connections between blocks of information - has always been thought that will require metadata.
+ Artificial Intelligence for computers to do what humans do - especially in seeing patterns.
+ Virtual worlds - live in them, create them.
+ Mobile web and location aware devices.
+ Attention Economy - "personalized news, personalized search, alerts and recommendations to buy"
+ Web sites as web services - starting to see this in widgets.
+ Online video / tv - get the television programming you want.
+ Rich Internet Apps (RIA)
+ International web - China, Korea, India - surely growth areas but will they use US-based sites and services?
+ Personalization - more and more of this unless people fear for privacy and turn it off.
At SEOMoz, randfish added his thoughts on trends - Where are Search Engines Most Likely To Innovate? - more query intent detection, more use of social, more verticals but the search engine has to recommend it. Some of this is good - I'd like to see some figures on how much searchers use suggested phrases especially those based on a log of queries - I'd rather an engine that can make sense of pages that are returned in a search set.
Yahoo! Buzzlist versus Google Trends, Andrew Pipes. Read/Write Web (Aug 2)
"This post takes a look at how the two biggest internet players, Yahoo! and Google, approach delivering content and services around a specific area: search trend data. Search engines have always had keen insights when it comes to knowing what's hot and what's not. It's as simple as analyzing the volume of search terms over time, and cutting those figures by geolocation, and often other factors. Most web users don't realize that Google and Yahoo! have created windows to this valuable data that anyone can play around with."
Measuring Web 2.0 Consumer Participation by Bill Tancer - Hitwise US Research Note
Many are adding content to the Web and participating in the Web 2.0 spirit. Data Hitwise has collected indicates that "Over the last two years, market share of U.S. visits to the top 20 participatory websites has grown from 3% of all U.S. Internet visits for the week ending June 18, 2005 to over 15.5% for the week ending June 16, 2007 ..." That's growth but are people intent on uploading or are they viewing also? Another question might be how good is this user content?
To read the report you need to register at Hitwise.
Statistics on Search Engines and their users, SEO News Blog (June 25)
Has data about Canadian search market obtained from a Canadian media and search engine advertising company called SKOOIZ. Report was about the internet usage and behavior of French Canadians based on a survey of 1272 Canadians.
+ 80 % of French Canadian uses Google, followed by Yahoo 3.6% and MSN with 2.5%.
+ 50% used two keywords, 30% used three keywords and 10% four or more keywords.
+ "About 50% of all French Canadian internet users use the advanced search operators for to optimize their queries from which 10% do that on regular basis."
+ "The largest portion of the French Canadian internet users form 25% of all users and are between 25-34 years old, followed by 19% for 45-54. The rest is about 15% youngsters 18-24, 10% teenagers, 12% for 55 and older and on last place 9.7% people of age 35-44."
What is the Future of Text Online? by Guillermo E Franco, Poynteronline (Mar 23)
According to Chris Nodder, a colleague of usability guru Jakob Nielsen, text as content still matters on Web pages and it should be presented in the inverted-pyramid style (conclusion first) and well chunked.
Also, people read in the f-shaped pattern - two scans across the page and then down the left side.
Video and audio are good and we're learning more about how to use them well. Video may become important for mobile phone, and audio for getting information through podcasts.
The Year in Search: A 2006 Review by Enid Burns, Clickz (Dec 21 )
Recaps Microsoft Live; Google Zeitgeist; Yahoo Search; AOL; and Lycos Top 50 - draw your own conclusions from these highlights of web, news, and product searches. If we were to judge the users of search engines from these results, the ones searching for news at Ask.com or Lycos seem to be more seriously minded.
Survey: General Search Fails Professionals, Searchengineland (Dec 19) -- Survey by Convera states that professionals "in publishing, advertising, marketing, healthcare, finance and government" are not satisfied with search results from search engines. Sullivan examined the numbers more closely and saw that 95% were very or somewhat satisified with results.
Study is at Knewworld - Professionals Reveal Their Search Failures, Successes
Police discovering power of YouTube by AMANDA-MARIE QUINTINO,
Canadian Press via Globe and Mail (Dec 15)
Police forces are starting to use YouTube to get witnesses to crimes. Hamilton police posted a one-minute clip of a surveillance video done of a hip-hop concert. Young people are frequent the social networking spaces and video sites - this could be a way of finding witnesses.
"Police are looking for two "people of interest" who were at a hip-hop concert the night a 22-year-old man from nearby Grimsby, Ont., was killed. The video clip has been viewed over 2,000 times since it was uploaded earlier this month."
Police are also catching people who have committed a crime through the videos they post themselves.
"It also works both ways: a pair of Winnipeg teens who posted a first-person, white-knuckle street-racing clip earlier this year soon found police knocking at their door, looking to talk to the people responsible for putting the clip online."
PEW Internet and American Life looked at podcast downloading (Nov 2006) - "Some 12% of internet users say they have downloaded a podcast so they can listen to it or view it at a later time. However, few internet users are downloading podcasts with great frequency; just 1% report downloading a podcast on a typical day."
Survey was done in August and does show roughly a doubling in use since April when 7% of people reported they had downloaded a podcast.
Interestingly this is not limited to young people. Percentage of those over 50 rose from 10% of users to 16%.
Pew Internet and American Life finds that people, especially young ones, use the Internet for science.
"Fully 40 million Americans use the internet as their primary source of news and information about science and 87% of online users have at one time used the internet to carry out research on a scientific topic or concept.
As a primary source for science information, the internet is second only to television among the general population. For Americans with high-speed internet connections at home, the internet is as popular as TV for news and information about science. And for young adults with high-speed connections at home, the internet is the most popular source for science news and information by a 44% to 32% margin over television.
The national survey conducted by the Pew Internet & American Life Project in collaboration with the Exploratorium http://www.exploratorium.edu benchmarks how the internet fits into people's habits for gathering news and information about science.
For the full report, please visit:
http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/191/report_display.asp"
Also How We Use the Internet for Science Research by Chris Sherman, SearchEngineWatch (Nov 21) -- good summary
Five Personalities Emerge From Broadband Users by Enid Burns, Clickz (Nov 16)
Which are you: content king; social clicker; online insider; fast tracker; and everyday pro?
"The everyday pro is characterized by personal productivity and efficiency and looks to the Internet to fulfill those needs. The group adopts complex tools to simplify life. About 84 percent use online banking, and 68 percent purchase from online retailers."
Web reaches new milestone: 100 million sites CNN (Nov 1)
""There are now 100 million Web sites with domain names and content on them," said Netcraft's Rich Miller" ... ""The Web has gone from being a very straightforward thing where you put some text and perhaps some images, to being this incredibly powerful medium in and of itself. You can engage so much more dynamically, and so many more people are doing so many more things. And who knows what will come about tomorrow?" said Grinter."
Majority of Online Health-Related Queries Start on Search Engines by Enid Burns, ClickZ (Oct 30)
Some startling figures about online health search are summarized from the latest report from the Pew Internet and American Life Project -- Online Health Search .
+ almost half of the queries are done for someone else.
+ 80 % of American users have searched on 1 of 17 health topics
+ people aren't checking the source - "only one quarter of the group say they always check the source and date of the information they look up. As many as half of the group claim they never check the source for the quality of information."
+ "Sixty-six percent of Internet users looking for health information start at a search engine versus 27 percent who go to a health-related site. A quarter of searches in the category say they felt overwhelmed with the information they found online."
Full report at
http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/190/report_display.asp
Also see comments by Chris Sherman - Rampant Malpractice Among Health Searchers (Oct 30)
The Internet, 'Family 2.0' And The 43-Hour Day, Greg Sterling, SEW Blog (Sep 26)
Yahoo and OMD, a communications specialist, have been studing the activities of 4,500 online families in 16 countries. The SEW picks up a few salient points that show how much our information lives have changed.
"Across the 11 categories of content that Yahoo-OMD explored (News, Travel, Jobs, Music, Movies, Finance, etc.) the Internet was the preferred source in all but two categories (News, Comedy/Humor), where TV was preferred with the Internet second."
From the press release: "The study, "It's a Family Affair: the Media Evolution of Global Families in a Digital Age," found that technology and media are essential to planning, researching and acting on many of family life's important priorities, and that multi-tasking significantly extends the average day's activities beyond 24 hours."
How dependent are we on technology? "The research also found that the average global family owns 11 technological devices (12 devices in the U.S.), creating concerns about information overload while enabling better communications ..."
Pew Internet and American Life project has assembled its data on usage of the Internet by Americans since 2000 in a spreadsheet researchers can download.
" The spreadsheet can be used to examine changes over time among online
Americans in key internet activities such as using email, getting news online, doing internet banking, using search engines, accessing weather information, buying products, pursuing hobby information, making travel reservations, getting sports information, downloading music and other digital files, sending instant messages, and participating in online auctions."
Start with the tip sheet - Usage Over Time Tip Sheet" http://www.pewinternet.org/trends/UsageOverTimeTipsheet.pdf
Study: Women just as comfy with tech, San Diego Union-Tribune (Aug 21)
It's about time someone studied this -- "Women are about as comfortable with the Internet, digital cameras and cell phones as men, according to a survey commissioned by the Oxygen Network that examined how men and women are using the latest gadgetry."
AOL Search Queries Open Window Onto Users' Worlds by Ellen Nakashima, Washington Post (Aug 17)
Last week AOL accidentally released three months of search logs of queries from 658,000 customers [ FAQ: AOL's Search Gaffe and You, Wired (Aug 11)].
Since then many have been digging into the data to see how and why people search. The Washington Post, as an example, has noted that often the searches are on social security numbers and telephone numbers. This article mentions many parsing projects including one by Paul Boutin - You Are What You Search published in Slate (Aug 11). He created a typology of AOL Search users using analysis through Splunkd.com. He found seven types including the Omnivore who looks for everything.
Internet a daily habit for most Canadians, CBC (Aug 15)
The Canadian Internet Use Survey from Statistics Canada shows that roughly two-thirds of Canadians (16.8 million adults) connect to the Internet at home. Women and men use the Internet in equal numbers but there are differences in how they use it: "... with women more likely to seek out health or medical information and men more likely to access government websites." Usage is lower in the country - only 58% connect from home.
+ 91% of households with internet do email.
+ 84% browse
+ 67% check the weather or road conditions
+ 63% make travel bookings
What is Statscan thinking? by Jack Kapica, Globe and Mail - Cyberia Blog (Aug 3)
"Statistics Canada dropped a non-bombshell this week. A respected organization, Statscan announced in a study that "heavy" Canadian users of the Internet -- those who spend more than an hour a day on the Internet -- devote less time to socializing with their spouses and children and less time doing household chores."
One hour a day - that's hardly time to check email and get the weather!
How the Web Was Won by Leslie Walker, Washington Post (Aug 3)
Leslie Walker picks out the themes of the story of the Web over the past eight years. Community in its various forms from DejaNews to today's MySpace is one. That we're all media producers now is another. E-commerce has grown dramatically and changed retail. To her the most fascinating story "how people took to the Internet to create and share information . In the past year, thousands of new Web communities have popped up offering twists on MySpace and YouTube."
This was Leslie Walker's last column. I'll miss her observations and analysis of the Web scene.
The Current State of the Internet: Walt Mossberg at the Closing General Session, Don Hawkins, Information Today Blog (June 14)
Walt Mossberg, technology columnist for the Wall Street Journal, talked about Internet, PCs and phones at the SLA Conference in Baltimore.
Of interest: "Search has been a tremendous democratizing force because it has become the way most people approach the Internet. But progress in searching has stalled—there has not been any real discernable improvement in the accuracy of results. Although there has been improvement in presentation of results, search should focus more on actual answers instead of a list of links. The biggest problem with search today is that the emphasis has left improving the results for the consumer in favor of selling ads."
"Mossberg feels that there is a big need for researchers like information professionals that are skilled at plucking out what users need—someone who understands the context of the research, and who can look for patterns that make sense. Many corporate level executives don’t have time to do this, even if they might have the skills to do it."
Understanding Searcher Behavior by Grant Crowell, SearchDay (June 14) - This was written for people in search marketing, but it's always interesting to learn more about search practices.
Kelsey Research found that -
+ 35% of online shoppers are loyal to one engine
+ 53% use 2 or 3 engines
+ 10% use more than 4 engines regularly
+ " 54% of search users have substituted Internet/search for the phone book, mostly for specific local lookups. Local is growing faster than general web search.""
CYBERIA: Usenet's death revisited by Jack Kapica, Globe and Mail (June 12)
Bell Sympatico dropped access to Usenet newsgroups on June 6 without warning and with next to no notice. The alternative they proposed at NewHosting.com doesn't work 3 days a week, although perhaps the premium service at $285 / year is better. Rogers closed its use of Usenet last December.
This confirms my view that the grassroots community activity that used to take place in newsgroups is finding other venues in the social networking centres and places like Yahoo Answers and of course Google and Yahoo Groups. It's not a complete match in function, but newsgroups had become run-down and loosing users.
Pew: Nearly 50 MM Americans Create Web Content, by Enid Burns, CLickz (May 30)
"Forty-eight million American adults have contributed some form of user-generated content on the Internet, it found. That's 35 percent of Internet users. Of those adults who have posted content on the Web, 73 percent, or 31 million, have a broadband connection at home."
""There is an element of the Internet being the medium for creativity and the Internet being an outlet for creativity people bring to the Worldwide Web," according to the report. It considers blogging, Web site creation, contribution of work on Web pages or blogs and submissions of artwork, photos, stories or videos as user-generated online content."
Peer-to-peer money, By Rafe Needleman, CNet News (May 24)
"Just as the Net allows individuals to find others who share their interests and ideas and form groups focused around them, it can help people with shared financial interests form groups and do commerce within the group. We're in the early stages of this, but a few examples show us how the Web is enabling a new kind of group commerce"
Search driving 80 percent of Google traffic, by Juan Carlos Perez, IDG News Service via Computerworld (May 22)
Google is still the most used seach engines at nearly 3 billion Google searches in March 2006 according to NetRatings. In the Google suite of search products, the search engine draws 80% of the traffic.
"Google's image search engine draws 9.5 percent of the visits, followed by Gmail with 5.5 percent and Google News with 1.49 percent, according to a blog posting by Bill Tancer, Hitwise's general research manager. (http://weblogs.hitwise.com). "
But at Yahoo -- "Most visits to Yahoo sites are to Yahoo Mail with 33 percent, followed by the Yahoo.com home page (32 percent), while Yahoo Search gets only 9.8 percent, according to Tancer. Something similar happens at MSN, where Hotmail gets the most visits (41 percent), followed by the MSN.com home page (33 percent), with MSN Search a distant third with 16 percent."
Number of Search Queries Gain in March, Google Leads the Way by Comscore (Apr 17)
"ComScore Networks today released its monthly qSearch analysis of activity across competitive search engines. In March 2006, Google gained in search market share versus year ago for the eighth consecutive month and maintained its status as market leader with 42.7 percent of searches conducted on its sites. Yahoo! remained in second place with 28.0 percent, while MSN ranked third with 13.2 percent."
+ Americans made 6.4 billion searches in March, up 10% from February.
+ Google sites had most of those searches (2.7 billion)
+ Among toolbar users, Google's toolbar is most used (48.9%), but Yahoo is a close second at 46.5%.
GOOGLE ACCOUNTS FOR NEARLY HALF OF ALL WEB SEARCHES, WHILE
APPROXIMATELY ONE THIRD ARE CONDUCTED ON YAHOO! AND MSN
COMBINED, ACCORDING TO NIELSEN//NETRATINGS Net-Ratings Inc (March 30, 2006)
Figures on search share for February 2006 show Google well in the lead again. Oddly, there is no mention of Ask.com.
"Google continues its lead in the search share competition, garnering 48.5
percent of all searches conducted in February 2006 (see Table 1). Yahoo! drew 22.5 percent of online searches, while MSN accounted for 10.7 percent of the search market. AOL and My Way Search rounded out the top five search providers with 6.6 and 2.7 percent of searches, respectively."
Image search grew by a stunning 91% in the United States. What do people do with all those pictures? Flickr isn't even on the list of Image Search Providers.
"Among search verticals, image search enjoyed the strongest year over year growth in February, increasing 91 percent. Google enjoyed the lion’s share of image search, with 71.9 percent, followed by Yahoo! with 19.1 percent and Ask.com with 3.5 percent (see Table 3). MSN and AOL rounded out the top
five image search providers."
Internet radio: Tuning in to local culture, TERRENCE BELFORD, The Globe and Mail (Apr 11)
"Two Canadian musical buffs, an international aid group and the state government of Chihuahua, Mexico ... [have] launched RadioTarahumara.com, aimed at bringing modern technology and communications to a remote Indian tribe in the mountains of Mexico's Chihuahua State."
"The Tarahumara are becoming familiar with computers as they use technology to create Internet radio programs aimed at educating, entertaining and improving the health of those in remote villages, he says. The programs also help preserve fast-disappearing cultural music and folk tales."
Hunting For Pictures Drives Big Boost In Web Searches, By Antone Gonsalves, TechWeb News (Mar 31) -- The number of searchers is stable but they are doing more searches is the finding from Nielsen/NetRatings.
"Overall searches in February increased by 38 percent to 5.3 billion, compared with 3.8 billion in the same month a year ago, Nielsen/NetRatings said. The increase was due to more searches per person, since the number of unique searchers remained stable. The average Web user conducted 43.1 searches in February, compared with 33.2 a year ago. In contrast, the number of unique searchers increased year over year by a modest 6 percent."
People are looking for more photos and pictures, with usage climbing at all the image search engines. Google, again the giant, handles 71.9 % of image searches; Yahoo has 19.1% and Ask, 3.5%. Broadband access and the popularity of places like Flickr contribute to the increase.
High-Powered Internet Users Identified as Online News Consumers, by ENid Burns, Clickz (Mar 23)
"A study of news consumption across all channels conducted by The Pew Internet & American Life Project creates a class of "high-powered" broadband users that consume more news and media on the Web than the average Internet user."
Why The Web Is Hitting A Wall -- "U.S. Internet growth is stalling. And it's not just the old or poor who are living offline", BusinessWeekOnline (Mar 20) - Not everyone is enamoured with the Web and some are actively resisting. Somefind it too complicated and expensive and others worry about security and privacy.
What amazed me -- " Other consumer electronics gear is much more widely adopted: Nearly 100% of U.S. households have a TV, 83% have a DVD player, and 78% have a cell phone. Despite their particular drawbacks, all these technologies are easier to use than an Internet-connected computer. " Cell phones are easy?
Top sites in February 2006: Yahoo!, Microsoft, MSN, Google, ZDNet (Mar 16) -- Nielsen/NetRatings posted figures for audience and time spent for the top sites.
Yahoo and AOL are very good in holding the eyeballs. Average times spent by people at web sites were:
Yahoo 3:10 minutes
AOL 6:00 minutes
eBay 1:53
MSN: 1:43
Yahoo also has a commanding lead in audience with Microsoft / MSN not far behind. Google does very well as a search engine.
Yahoo 102 million
Microsoft 95.5 million
MSN 91.6 million
Google 89 million
MapQuest is in the top 10 for audience (36.7 million) indicating the popularity of that service for maps and directions.
Nielsen//NetRatings: What Search Slowdown?, by Pamela Parker, Clickz (Mar 3) -- comScore Media Metrix sees a slowdown in the growth of web searching over the past year, but Nielsen/NetRatings says otherwise. Both peg the volume at 5.5 to 5.7 billion searches in January 2006. It's possible that there is a slowere growth in new searchers, but existing searchers are searching more.
Google still has the lead at 48% and Yahoo at 22%. Each picked up 1% from MSN which is now at 11%.
The Web: Just for Fun by Enid Burns, CLickZ (Feb 17) -- New study from PEW Internet and American Life shows that people are going to the Web just to surf for fun. People who have broadband are more likely to do this than those with dialup.
"Roughly 40 million people go online for fun on a typical day. The majority of surfers in this category are men (34 percent); 26 percent of women go online with no clear purpose.
Young adults are the most likely demographic to consume the casual Web. Thirty-seven percent of 18 to 29 year-olds go online for fun on a typical day. Thirty-one percent of those age 30 to 49, and 24 percent of adults over age 50, are likely to brows the Web for enjoyment rather than function. "
See Growing Numbers Surf the Web Just for Fun for the full report at PEWinternet.org.
Search Engine Traffic Soars, "Google remains the site of choice for most surfers, market researcher says." Dan Nystedt, IDG News Service via PCWorld (Feb 13)
Online searching soared in the US, moving up to 5.1 billion searches in December, according to Nielsen/NetRatings.
"Google not only ranked first out of approximately 60 search engines, it also widened the gap between itself and number two Yahoo by grabbing 48.8 percent of all search traffic in December, or nearly 2.5 billion searches, up from 43.1 percent during the same time a year earlier."
Online Searches Grow 55 Percent Year-Over-Year to Nearly 5.1 Billion Searches in December 2005, According to Nielsen//NetRatings - Google Sees Five-Point Gain in Search Share Rankings, PRNewsire via Marketwatch (Feb 9)
"Nielsen//NetRatings, a global leader in Internet media and market research, today reported that the total number of searches in the U.S. conducted across approximately 60 search engines grew 55 percent year-over-year to nearly 5.1 billion searches in December 2005 (see Table 1). There were 3.3 billion searches conducted via search engines in December 2004."
Google has 48.9% of the search share, Yahoo 21.4% and MSN 10.9%.
Web-Based Applications Are The Next Wave: Zoho Shows The Way by Robin Good (-- interview with Sridhar Vembu, CEO of Zoho.com, creator of web-based applications that may be alternatives to the Microsoft suite of desktop-bound applications.
How people use search engines by Dan Blacharski, ITworld.com /23/2006
HIghlights from recent studies on usage and search engine standings.
+ "43 percent of online searchers use the search dialog to find their way to common Web sites, as opposed to just typing the URL into the address bar of the browser. " (Nielsen//NetRatings)
+ "Google and Yahoo! are diverting ad revenue from the "old guard" information companies, many of which own newspapers and magazines. " (Outsell)
+ "the top three search engines made up 93.5 percent of all U.S. Internet searches, with Google taking the lion's share, or 59.2 percent, of search activity." (Hitwise)
Google increases lead over Yahoo in search Juan Carlos Perez, IDG News Service (Jan 9) - Comscore's November figures show Google handling 39.8% of all searches in the US, and Yahoo slipping to 29.5%. MSN was 14.2%; Ask Jeeves - 6.5%; AOL - 8.7%
Google Pack: A bundle of free software, Pandia (Jan 1) - Google has developed a bundle of free software that people running Windows XP can download. Several Google applications, along with Adobe, Norton Anti-Virus and the Firefox browser are included. Why? Could be very appealing to new users and build even more loyality.
How Women and Men Use the Internet: "Women are catching up to men in most measures of online life. Men like the internet for the experiences it offers, while women like it for the human connections it promotes." Deborah Fallows, PEW/Internet (Dec 28)
Men are first to use new technologies. Men, according to this report, will also use the Net for a wider range of information and as a destination for recreation / entertainment. Women still show a preference for using the Internet to connect with others. But both are using the Net for online transactions, and both value the access to information.
Of interest: men "... work search engines more aggressively, using engines more often and with more confidence than women. " 88% of men say they find what they are looking for vs 86% for women. And 54% express self-confidence in searching, whereas only 40% of women do.
[This study is based on self-reporting. To dare even more generalizations, we might point out that women tend to be less self-confident than men.]
Study also examined the strategies men and women use at search engines. Both used similar approaches for health and government, tending to start at a search engine and then specific sites as a secondary step. But for religion they started with a known site, and turned to the search engine as a second resort.
Study: Google users wealthier, more Net savvy - The longer people have been using the Internet, the more likely it is that they'll use Google, study finds, By Juan Carlos Perez, IDG News Service
"The longer people have been using the Internet, the more likely it is that Google will be their search engine of choice, according to a survey of 1,000 U.S. Internet users conducted by investment banking and research firm S.G. Cowen & Co. LLC."
Google users are also wealthier. In all, it's very flattering for Google users. Google still leads with 52% of searchers choosing it over Yahoo (22%) or MSN or AOL (9 % each)
Many went on-line for hurricane news AP via Globe and Mail (Nov 24)
"More than half of U.S. Internet users went on-line for news and information about hurricanes Katrina and Rita, the vast majority having visited the websites of traditional news organizations such as CNN and MSNBC, a study has found."
+ 14% went to non-US sources such as BBC.
+ 75% used website of major US news organization
+ 54 % - alternative source
+ 9% made donations online
See 13 million Americans made donations online after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, Pew Internet and American Life (No v 24)
Top search engines in October 2005: Google, Yahoo!, MSN, Ask ZDNet (Nov 21)
No surprise - ComScore's statistics for October 2005 show Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask as the top four engines by number of users in the US. Google has 75 million to Yahoo's 68. Interestingly MSN, at nearly 49.7 million, is just ahead of Ask.com at 43.7 million.
There is also something called MySpace. Search in the 7th spot (8 million users) that I've never heard of. MYSpace.com turns out to be a "place for friends" with a whole raft of personal services - blogs, mail, groups, events, calendars, music, classified - a portal for the young.
Study: Search claims solid No. 2 spot by Anick Jesdanun, AP via BusinessWeek Online (Nov 20) Using the Internet for searching for information is second only to email. Email is used by 77% of the "sampled population" and 44 % do a search.
"Until recently, search and news have been running neck-and-neck for the No. 2 spot among Internet tasks, said Lee Rainie, the project's director. But search had a dramatic jump over the past year to widen the gap over news, used by 46 percent of the Internet's daily population."
See the memo by Pew Internet and American Life - Search engine use shoots up in the past year and edges towards email as the primary internet application.
Holidays Cook Up Traffic to Recipe Sites by Enid Burns, Clickz (Nov 18) - People, as they get ready for US Thanksgiving, are using search engines to find recipes almost half of the time (48%), and for the rest they use the big recipe sites --
"Most searchers went to the Food Network (22.24 percent) site to get recipes for Thanksgiving. Other recipe hounds followed links to Kraftfoods.com (9.42 percent), Allrecipes.com (9.12 percent), and Cooks.com (3.48 percent)."
It's no surprise that women are doing most of the searching, but why are 41% over 55? What are younger women doing - leaving it to their mothers and grandmothers? Why do older women want the recipes - are they tired of their old recipes?
"Recipe seekers are typically women. They made up sixty-one percent of traffic sent to food and beverage sites in the second week of November. Forty-one percent of food and beverage site visitors are likely to be over 55."
Internet study shows Canadians are heavy users CBC News (Nov 2) A survey by the Canadian Internet Project "showed that 56 per cent of all Canadians are online at least seven hours a week, with the average Canadian user online 13.5 hours each week."
Of interest: "Most Canadians report little awareness of Canadian cultural content on the internet while fewer than a third of Canadians are satisfied with the quality, quantity and accessibility of Canadian cultural content online."
Internet Use Up, but So Is User Concern AP via Yahoo News (Oct 27) The US Census Current Population Survey done for October 2003 shows 55% of American households had access to the Internet. A survey by PEW Internet and American Life early in 2005 indicated 68% of adults use the Internet.
"Susannah Fox, who worked on the Pew report, said age and education were the strongest predictors of whether someone uses the Internet. Young adults were the most likely to use the Internet, with a big drop-off among people 70 and older."
But people are changing their habits on line in the face of spyware and viruses.
Of interest: "A survey released this week by Consumer Reports Webwatch found that 86 percent of computer users have changed their online behavior in some way because of concerns about identity theft. A little more than half stopped giving out personal information on the Web, while 25 percent said they stopped making online purchases."
Refers to: U.S. Census Bureau: http://www.census.gov/population/www/socdemo/computer.html
Information Today is blogging the Internet Librarian conference, now underway at Monterey, California. The opening keynote speech was by Lee Rainie of the Pew Internet and American Life project about how the Internet has changed our lives and continue to do so - likely dramatically. Summary of the talk was written by Don Hawkins.
Broadband Adoption in the United States: Growing but Slowing Pew Internet and American Life (Sept 21)
From the press release - "The growth in home high-speed internet adoption, after growing quickly in the past several years, has slowed down and is poised to slow even further, according to a new report released by the Pew Internet & American Life Project."
Less is More in Web Search Interfaces for Older Adults by Anne Aula and Mika Kaki, First Monday (July 2005) - Compares use of Google to Etsin, an interface designed specially for older adults. Found that Google is not especially user friendly, especially to older users. Generally participants in this study preferred Etsin. Participants were 56 to 82 years old (average = 63.3) Main finding -- "In the quest for elderly–friendly search interfaces, our study showed that a simple design makes the search experience less problematic and more manageable for older adults."
Men are Media Hogs By Enid Burns, ClickZ Stats (Aug 26) - New report from Forrester Research shows that men spend more time on the computer and the Internet than women (6.7 hours online for men v 5.3 for women), and they do different things. Survey was of 5,000 US and Canadian individuals.
"On the Web, men tend to surf for news, magazines, finance, job and career information. They also visit discussion boards and comparison shop. Online activities for women skew more toward utility; they get movie information, play games, share photos, and use online phone directories."
Will Google ever get into music? Commentary: Google Tunes, why not? by Bambi Francisco, Marketwatch [requires subscription] (Aug 23) -- " For all of Google's innovation and desire to organize the world's information, it seems the search giant should find a way to manage our digital music libraries."
Downloading music and searching for music-related terms is very popular, and music services attract big audiences. Article has some figures on searches and downloads. "Music indexing seems an obvious extension of Google's content-aggregating activities. After all, music is widely searched, downloaded, listened to, and bought on the Web"
ComScore: Google, Yahoo! Still Dominate Search; MSN Gains Ground
by Gavin O'Malley, MediaPosts (Aug 22)
comShare stats for July show that Google, Yahoo!, MSN, AOL, Ask Jeeves, and InfoSpace are "tightening their hold" on the market. While the search market grew in the US with 22 percent more searches, "The pack's share of total searches increased from 98.5 percent in July 2004 to 99.4 percent by July 2005, according to comScore's monthly qSearch analysis. "
+ Google 36.5
+ Yahoo 30.5
+ MSN 15.5
Canadian Internet Subscriptions Hit Plateau by Jack Kapica, Globe Technology (Aug 16) TNS Canadian Facts, in its annual study, found that 73% of Canadians have internet access, 64% of those have high speed. Broadband is evenly split between cable and DSL. But growth has stalled in part due to limited service to small communities and price resistance.
Study had some figures on what Canadians do on the Internet.
+ 74% read news
+ 97% e-mail
+ 82% "surfing for personal interest or general knowledge"
+ 41% comparison shop but only 34% buy.
+ 30% download music.
Summary of report is also available from this press release - Internet Penetrates More Deeply Into Canadians' Daily Lives [pdf].
Debating the size of the Web by John Markoff, International Herald Tribune (Aug 16) - Yahoo's announcement that it had indexed 19.1 billion documents has sparked another debate over how large the Web is. Researchers at the National Center for Supercomputer Applications ran some searches against Google and Yahoo to try to ascertain size and concluded that on average Google returned 166.9% more results than Yahoo. So what gives? In the end, no one knows - could be the way the engines count.
Youthful surfers make waves among Canada's advertisers by Scott Deveau, Globe Technology (Aug 9)
"Canadian youth are now spending more time surfing the Internet than vegging in front of the TV, an Ipsos-Reid poll released Tuesday says."
+ On average, Canadians are using the Internet 12.7 hours a week -- 46-per-cent increase since 2002.
+ "television retains the No. 1 overall position for media consumption among all age groups at 14.3 hours a week." But, "The gap between hours spent in front of the television as opposed to the Internet has dropped to 1.6 hours from 4.5 hours a week only three years ago."
+ "no particular news Web site has emerged as a national leader".
Majority of Users Get to Web sites Via Search, Survey Says EContent (Aug 5)
"A recent BURST! Media survey of 13,000 Web users, 14 years and older, finds that most of them navigate to the Web sites they visit through search engines. More than half (56.2%) of respondents said that when at home they use search engines to get to Web destinations. Other ways respondents use to get to Web sites include typing in the site's URL/bookmarks (28.0%), and links from other sites/advertisements (16.1%)."
Search engines are certainly a very easy way to find a well known site and will be a very fast method when you know the exact name. Saved searches through the personal versions of Yahoo and Google may help in relocating urls. Both reduce the need to keep extensive and unwieldly bookmark lists.
How Americans Search by Chris Sherman, SearchDay (July 12) - summarizes findings from icrossing about what Americans search for online.
"Most people (88%) said they were researching specific topics—specifically, information about hobbies. And women (61%) were more likely to search for health and medical information than men (35%). Surprisingly few people researching specific topics are looking for job or career information (28%)."
Detected some differences in use of search engines between users of Ask Jeeves, MSN, and Google.
See press release from icrossing -- New icrossing Research Reveals 'How America Searches' (June 21)
Pew Internet and American Life Project has new reports on online activities and pursuits.
Use of Webcams - who would have guessed?
"One out of six American adult internet users (16%) have gone online to view another person or a place via a web cam. That translates into roughly 21 million people who have viewed material on web cams. And on any given day, about two million internet users are checking out remote places or people by using webcams."
Online sports fantasy leagues
"Eight percent of adult American internet users say they participate in sports fantasy leagues online. That represents roughly 11 million people. And on a typical day, about 2 million internet users are going online to oversee and check on their fantasy teams."
Do-it-yourself information online
"Some 55% of adult internet users have looked for "how-to," "do-it-yourself" or repair information online and roughly 1 in 20 internet users - about 7 million people -- search for help on a typical day. The prevalence of this activity is yet another example of the many ways online Americans use the internet to gather practical information for their everyday lives."
A Search Tool for Your Online Passwords By Chris Sherman, SearchDay (June 9) -- RoboForm - "A search toolbar that can be configured to use your favorite engine, and securely manages all of your online login details and passwords to boot." Gives a full review. Has a 30 day trial and costs $29.99 US.
PCWorld has announced The 100 Best Products of 2005 at PC World. Categories covered:
PCs and Peripherals
Office Software
Security
Storage and Backup
Web
Monitors and TVs
Digital Photography
Printing and Publishing
Mobile Tools
Consumer Products
Drumroll - best product of 2005 - Firefox browser.
Others to note:
Gmail
A9 search engine
Flickr for photo showing and sharing
Wikipedia for online reference
Opera browser
Copernic Desktop Search
Copernic Desktop Search Wins 2005 World Class Award From PC World - Press Release, Copernic (June 1) - Copernic Desktop Search has one a few other awards in addition to this from PC World -- "CDS has collected prestigious awards such as Editors’ Choice from CNET, LAPTOP Magazine, and Pandia Search Central, and has been selected as first choice in comparison reviews by The Boston Globe, Legal IT, Slate Magazine, the University of Wisconsin E-Business Consortium, the American Library Association, and many others."
See ranked list of all products.
Tucows expands download business by Jack Kapica, Globe Technology (May 31) - Tucows, a very popular and good site for getting reviews on software and the getting the download, is adding applications.
"New library categories will be added, among them Software for iPods and PSP for website design. The editorial content has been increased and RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds have been added.
Navigation of the Tucows site has been completely redesigned, and the mirroring system has been re-engineered to increase download capacity and speed without increasing the capacity required of any single mirror partner."
Search for your operating system or browse by application.
Tucows and Cnet's Download.com are two of the best places for finding freeware and shareware. Two others for PC users are PC Magazine Downloads and PC World downloads.
Internet users, heal thyself -
The Pew Internet & American Life Project says more people are searching for medical information - Orlando Sentinel (May 18)
"Ninety-five million American adults -- about 80 percent of Internet users -- have searched for health information on the Internet, according to a survey released Tuesday.
Most -- 66 percent -- are looking for information about a specific disease or medical problem, but 51 percent said they were looking for ways to stay healthy, researching diet, nutrition or vitamin information."
Has some tips about the type of health site to seek out.
Full report at Health Information Online, Pew Internet and American Life
JupiterResearch Reveals Growing Preference for Online News at the Expense of TV and Newspapers, Business Wire in CBS MarketWatch (April 26)
"JupiterResearch, a division of Jupitermedia Corporation (JUPM), today reported that the number of online adults who prefer the Internet as their main source of news has grown over 35% in the last four years, at the expense of television and newspapers. Currently, over 26% of online adults prefer the Internet for national and international news, compared to 19% in 2001."
NetRatings Search Popularity Stats For March 2005 & MSN's Share - by Danny Sulllivan, in SEW blog (Apr 22 ) -- MSN had a slight drop to 13.6% and Google a slight increase.
Refers to Nielsen NetRatings Search Engine Ratings for March 2005.
Viewing the Search Landscape - By Andrew Goodman, SearchDay (April 26) - examines variations in market share figures for search engines. Hitwise says Google has 55% of US market and Comscore suggests 36%. Article also touches on demographics of search engine use. Some information about local search and shopping search.
Molly Wood at AnchorDesk wrote a Eulogy for Usenet (Jan 27) on the news that AOL would no longer provide Usenet feeds. The electronic bulletin boards of Usenet newsgroups were where the action was in the 1990s, but spam, viruses, and noise took their toll while other forums on the Web and now community blogs became more popular. The newsgroups themselves probably won't die. Google Groups is building on them to compete with Yahoo's Groups. But the whole routine of file transfer and special newsreaders that was Usenet could fall away.
Internet users are still naive when using search engines. A report from Pew Internet and American Life and earlier from Consumer Reports WebWatch show that searchers don't distinguish between paid and unpaid listings. According to the Pew report only 38% of searchers were aware of the difference between paid and unpaid listings and 47% of those said they can always tell which are which. Also, searchers tend to stick to one engine - 44% regularly use one and 48% use two or three. The real kicker is that 92% say they are fairly confident about their searching abilities, and 68% think search engines are an unbiased source of information.
Search Engine Users: Internet searchers are confident, satisfied and trusting – but they are also unaware and naïve by Deborah Fallows, Pew Internet Life (Jan 23, 2005)
In Search of Disclosure: How Search Engines Alert Consumers to the Presence of Advertising in Search Results Consumer Reports WebWatch (Nov 8 2004)
Also see Survey: Searchers are Confident, Satisfied & Clueless by Chris Sherman, SearchDay (Jan 24)
Poll Finds Increasing Interest in Virtual Tours TechWeb News (Dec 30) Many internet users are taking virtual tours, according to a study by Pew Internet & American Life Project. Tourists tend to be older internet users.
See Pew / Internet - Virtual Tours
"Some of the most popular virtual tour destinations include museums, tourist and vacation locales, colleges and prep schools, real estate, historical exhibits, parks and nature preserves, public places such as the White House and the Taj Mahal, and hotels and motels."
Smart Web Changes World Reuters via Wired (Oct 31) - preview of some discussions expected at the ITXpo symposium. in France -- "The next cycle of connectivity, where all systems understand each other, has barely started, while the following cycle -- in which this intelligence is embedded in every device -- is still a dream." "Ubiquitous intelligence" is still a long time off.
Local Search and Online Shopping Among Leading Online Consumer Behaviors Results of new survey by BizRate.com and The Kelsey Group to be presented next week at Kelsey's Interactive Local Media 2004 conference. PRNewswire via CBS Marketwatch (Oct 28) -- Survey of 3887 online respondents found
- 72% use general search engines 9 or more times a month, but only 35% are loyal to one search engine
- Internet mapping sites were number one "when indexed by familiarity, frequency of use, and loyalty"
- next in line for popularity: Yellow Pages, online classifieds, shopping search sites and entertainment information sites, online travel sites, local destination sites and vertical directories.
Information Research Volume 10 No 1 October 2004 -- Papers presented at ISIC 2004: the 5th Information Seeking in Context Conference, Dublin, Ireland, 1-3 September, 2004
Has several articles on information seeking behaviour - notably:
" Enthusiastic, realistic and critical: discourses of Internet use in the context of everyday life information seeking"
"Information behaviour that keeps found things found"
" Information behaviour of migrant Hispanic farm workers and their families in the Pacific Northwest"
"Seeking information, seeking connections, seeking meaning: genealogists and family historians"
"'Whoever increases his knowledge merely increases his heartache.' Moral tensions in heart surgery patients' and their spouses' talk about information seeking"
Google will be introducing a short message system (Google SMS) to cell phone users in the United States for looking up information through text messages. What is Google SMS? Will be useful for addresses, prices, definitions.
Next big thing: The Web as your servant By Kevin Maney, USA TODAY (Oct 1) -- Predicts that the Web will evolve into a huge network itself of various and varied applications - a "world network".
"The Web, though, is becoming the first piece of the bigger network as it meshes with new technologies that started from disparate corners of the industry — such as Wi-Fi wireless broadband connections, the Global Positioning System (GPS) and radio frequency identification tags (RFID)."
Hold onto seat belts if only half of what is imagined comes true.
Where did the time go? The Internet at 35: Still evolving CNN (August 29) But at 35 some stiffness might creep in, might see early signs of arthritis and perhaps clogged arteries.
Users Connect Online with Offline By Robyn Greenspan. CLickZ Stats ( August 24, 2004) - summary of Pew Internet and American Life Project findings on online and offline activities. There are some activities such as getting directions to places, checking the weather, and looking up sports scores that will soon be done more often online than offline. But people still prefer offline for "playing games, pursuing hobbies, listening to music or the radio, reading for pleasure, and watching videos, previews and cartoons." Who knows - when the Internet is truly ubiqitous that may change too.
Seems searchers are fairly satisfied with the results from search engines. This is the message of a new study from Pew Internet & American Life. Some 87% of searchers say they find what they want "most of the time". 92% are "somewhat" confident in their searching ability. Quite astonishingly 68% feel that search engines are a "fair and unbiased" source of information.
Google led as the most used (47%) with Yahoo (26), MSN (7) and AOL (5) behind.
Many people use two or three engines (48%), but there is still a large number stuck at one (44%).
Dependence on search engines is rising. 32% of those who have used one couldn't live with out online search.
Data Memo on Search Engines by Deborah Fallows (and others)
Summarized in Internet Users Rely On Search, And Get Results, Study Finds By Larry Dobrow. MediaPost (Aug 16)
MSN-Harris Interactive Survey Asks: What Is America Searching For? PR Newswire (Aug 8)
Survey by Harris Interactive and MSN looked at what Americans used search engines for. "Almost half (48 percent) of respondents confirmed they use search engines at least once a day, and over two-thirds (69 percent) said that search engines are the fastest way to get the information they are looking for. The results established that users turn to search engines to get all kinds of news and information, on topics ranging from the war and the presidential race to celebrity gossip, and even to search for long-lost friends."
Pew Internet Life looks at use of Voice over Internet Protocol (VOIP). 17% of Americans have heard of it. Only 1 in 8 Internet users are considering using it. VoIP requires broadband to be used effectively. Adoption may be slow, but VoIP is expected to replace traditional telephony.
One Quarter of Online Americans Have Heard of VoIP Pew Internet Life (June 27, 2004)
Time for a Redesign: Dr. Jakob Nielsen by Brad Wieners. CIO Insight (June 1) In this interview, web-usability guru, Jakob Nielsen, identifies bad search design a continuing problem for intranets and individual sites. Users need to know where to look - there isn't a good unified search. Pages are poorly described or indexed. Public web pages are often very vague - more hype than useful information. Article has many bits of advice for the web site designer.
Pew Internet Project has released a report on attitude towards graphic news images online - Reports: Major News Events . Millions go online to seek out images that mainline news media decline to show. Study was based on nationwide phone survey done between May 14 and June 17 2004.
"During some of the most turbulent weeks of the Iraq war nearly one quarter of Internet users (24%) went online to view some of most graphic war images that were deemed too gruesome or horrific for newspapers and television to display. Further, of those who have seen the images, 28% actively sought them out. "
Respondents were divided on whether the images should be shown on television or in newspapers. Gender, political leanings, income and age seemed to influence viewpoint. Males, under 30-year-olds, and liberals were more in favour of showing the images than were females, older people, or Republicans.
ClickZ has a recap - Americans Find Graphic Images Online - by Robyn Greenspan (July 9)
Canadians Are More Active Online Searchers Than Their U.S. Counterparts, According to comScore Networks (May 13) - from comScore qSearch
More detail on the study done by comScore. Use of Google is much higher than either Yahoo or MSN. Google gets 62% share of searches and has a searcher penetration of 65%. Yahoo has 15% of search but does reach 41% for searcher penetration - meaning that 41% of searchers do use Yahoo but only for 15% of their searches. MSN is about the same at 12% and 46%. In the United States, Google receives 36% share of searches, Yahoo 30%, MSN 16%, and all others 18%.
Canadians Are More Active Online Searchers Than Their U.S. Counterparts, According to comScore Networks PR Newswire (May 13) - Canadians use search engines more but they don't shop online. Also 60% of home users have a broadband connection.
"A comparison of search engine market share in Canada and the U.S. reveals significant differences in the competitive landscape of these two countries. Google, which has a 6-point share lead over Yahoo! in the U.S., holds a dominant share of the market in Canada, accounting for 62 percent of all searches conducted by Canadian Internet users in April 2004. In April, more than 40 percent of Canadian Internet users conducted at least one search at MSN and Yahoo! (as represented by "Searcher Penetration"), a reflection of the massive reach of their online properties, which are visited by 96 and 75 percent of the Canadian Internet population, respectively. "
Search Engine Users: Loyal or Blase? by Chris Sherman. SearchDay (April 19) The iProspect Search Engine User Attitudes Survey found that 56.7 % of searchers use only one search engine, 30% can name a set of engines, and 13% select the engine according to the need. Favourite engine is Google at 66%, Tahoo! - 55%, MSN close behind at 54% and AOL at 49 percent. People do change their queries - 90% "tweak". Toolbars are popular - 50% of the searchers had one.
More comments from Rita Vines at Sitelines -- Google - Loyalty or Laziness - in which she suggests that people may be stuck on Google because they don't know the alternatives. She references an article from Library Journal in which librarians name high quality specialty sites as reliable online sources, and the scientists name Google, Yahoo and Pubmed.
Some high usage figures for online activity turned up in Pew Internet American Life's latest survey. Based on tracking figures from February 2004, 63% of Americans use the Internet and 73% of adults have computers. More people are participating in online auctions (23%) and online buying (65%). Experience is building too - 53% have been using the Net for at least 6 years.
Complete data memo on wireless connectivity, e-shopping, auctions, and Internet demographics (April 13)
Internet threatens traditional media: Survey by Jack Kapica. Globe and Mail (April 1) -- A study from Ipsos-Insight, The Face of the Web, finds that broadband delivery over the Web of entertainment and communication will affect traditional media. New activity includes sharing pictures, viewing video streams, (although music downloads have stalled), online gaming, and online banking.
"Study co-author Nilesh Modi said that "no doubt, the continued transfer to broadband, and increased deployment of Wi-Fi and cellular technology is most likely to stimulate greater consumer use of VoIP, through both wired and wireless networks.""
Older Americans and the Internet Pew Internet and American Life (March 24)
"The percent of seniors who go online has jumped by 47% between 2000 and
2004. In a February 2004 survey, 22% of Americans age 65 or older reported
having access to the Internet, up from 15% in 2000."
Also see The Net's Late Bloomers By KATIE HAFNER. New York Times (March 25)
"Once largely written off as a lost cause, older Americans are now coming into their own as Internet users. They are researching their family histories, sending e-mail, running virtual book clubs, reading about religion and travel, and pursuing other interests lifelong and new. ....
Despite the increases, this age group still has a long way to go. Only 22 percent of Americans over 65 go online, the study shows, compared with 75 percent of those ages 30 to 49. But as Americans who are more comfortable with computers gradually reach the age of 65, the percentage going online (or more precisely, staying online) should soar."
U.S. Internet Population Crosses 200M DM News (March 19) 74.9 % of Americans have access to the Internet from home.
E-mail, VoIP Span Net Activities List By Robyn Greenspan. CLickZStats (March 2004) There are many Internet activities that people don't do - starting with making phone calls (87%) and taking courses (75%). Check Trends and Statistics
One in Three Americans Use a Search Engine, According to Nielsen//NetRatings PRNewswire via CBS NewsWatch (Feb 23) [Alternate copy from NetRatings - pdf file]
Nielsen//NetRatings found that "114.5 million or 39 percent of Americans used a search engine during January 2004". These users represent 76% of the US online population. They spent 40 minutes on average in the month using search engines.
Top destinations were
- Google 39.37%
- Yahoo 30.38
- MSN 29.63
- AOL 15.53
- Ask Jeeves 8.49
Online shoppers used search engines too - especially Google (36%) and Yahoo (25.3%)
Users were interviewed for most desired qualities. Not suprisingly relevancy was most important (51.8%) and credibility second (34.2%). (But it is odd that these were separated. If asked I think most people would say relevant and accurate was the most important.) Speed of results was important to 33%. Interface and design were the least important.
CNet covered the report too. Google tops the search charts By Dinesh C. Sharma (Feb 23)
comScore Media Metrix Announces Top 50 U.S. Internet Property Rankings for January 2004 (Feb 17) "On America’s Mind in January: Taxes, Politics and Diets"
"“Consumer behavior followed patterns that we’ve seen for several years and have come to expect, reflecting the official kickoff of the tax season and the unofficial start of the diet season,” said Peter Daboll, president and CEO of comScore Media Metrix. “But we also saw the effects of the Democratic primaries and unique news events, underscoring the degree to which the Web has become a natural extension and barometer of everyday life.”"
Yahoo is king - it received 110 million unique visitors in January - 72% of the U.S. Internet user population. MSN, AOL, eBay, and Google follow in spots 2 to 5.
Canada leads global pack in Internet use - Number of people using the Net rose 7% in 2003 - Mark Evans, Financial Post (Jan 22)
"Ipsos-Insight discovered that 71% of Canadian adults accessed the Internet in 2003, compared with 70% in South Korea, 68% in the United States and 65% in Japan. In 2002, U.S. adults were the most active with 72%, while Canada was second at 62% and South Korea at 53%."
Number of people using the Net worldwide rose by 7% mainly due to increases in users in urban China, Germany, Japan and South Korea.
Information Research (January 2004 - Vol 9, No 2) available at http://InformationR.net/ir/ - has papers from a conference on digital libraries, held in Finland in September 2003.
Professor Tom Wilson of Sheffield University mentions another article in his covering email.
A longitudinal study of Web pages continued: a consideration of document persistence by Wallace Koehler of Valdosta State University, Georgia, USA,
"This one is a longitudinal study, covering the period 1996 to 2003, and using a sample of 361 Web pages collected in 1996 - eroded by May 2003 to 122. The author comments: There are two interesting trends that emerge from this analysis. First, once a collection has sufficiently aged, it may stabilize in the sense at least that its URLs may become more durable in time. We have shown, for example, that Koehler's collection of randomly collected URLs remained in a fairly 'steady-state' for two years after it lost approximately two-thirds of its population over a four year period. From a collection development perspective, this period of stability has been but of short duration. Additional monitoring is needed to establish resource lifetimes."
The typical web surfer reads, has friends, watches less television than non-surfers, and believes what is found on the Internet.
Internet 'Geek' Image Shattered by New Study by Bernhard Warner, European Internet Correspondent Reuters (Jan 14)
Findings come from a study done by the London-based World Internet Project of Internet users in 14 countries.
Of interest,
"The study does however support some long-established Internet usage trends including the fact that the wealthiest segments of the population are the most avid users and that more men than women surf the Web. But figures vary widely by country. "
"Despite the existence of countless spoof Web sites and message boards that carry oddball political rants, more than half of Internet users surveyed said "most or all" of the information they find online is reliable and credible. The most trusting users are in South Korea while Swedes are the biggest skeptics about the veracity of Web news."
Top Internet Trends for 2004 by Rob Greenlee, Web Talk Guys Radio Show (Jan 7, 2004)
Among the top ten are the decline of the web browser, growth in Internet radio, online search beyond the web, professional journalist blogs being syndicated. Re search -- "Online search will go beyond just the web and will dramatically change in 2004. Google will continue to lead the changes to online search, but Yahoo and Microsoft will steal some of Google's search market share. The New Year will continue with the growing effort to index more than just the World Wide Web, as search companies find other deep database information to index and make public on the web. "
A Net of Control -- Unthinkable: How the Internet could become a tool of corporate and government power, based on updates now in the works by Steven Levy. Newsweek. (Dec 2003) - The Internet may not live up to early expectations of promoting democracy and openness. John Walker, once of Autodesk, has examined the nightmarish dangers in a web document, Digital Imprimatur. Another equally worried is Lawrence Lessig. Concludes by saying "staving off the Internet power shift will be a difficult task, made even harder by apathy on the part of users who won’t know what they’ve got till it’s gone."
U.S. Net population levels off by Alorie Gilbert. CNet News.com (Dec 24) Reports on the latest study by Pew Internet and American Life Project.
"While e-mail and searching for information are far and away the most popular on-line pastimes in the United States, on-line banking, travel planning, participating in an on-line auction and downloading music have become the fastest-growing Internet activities in recent years, according to the study."
About 2/3 of the US population uses the Net, and 1/3 of those have a high-speed connection.
Full report -- America's Online Pursuits: The changing picture of who's online and what they do Pew Internet and American Life (Dec 22, 2003)
On-line maps spark fear of stalkers Associated Press (Dec 19) - People are getting spooked by the ease with which others can find where they live on an online map through a phone number. On the other hand, the Internet is an information appliance used by millions of people for legitimate reasons.
Bias cramps Internet Associated Press via Globe and Mail (Dec 18) The Internet is still very Western and in the English language. Problems and solutions were discussed at the UN World Summit on the Information Society in Geneva.
"As a result, there's little specific to developing countries, which remain largely offline. According to the UN International Telecommunication Union, 1.5 billion villages have no access at all to phones or the Internet, and 70 per cent of Internet users live in countries that make up only 16 per cent of the world's population."
The WSIS: whose freedom, whose information? Solana Larsen OpenDemocracy.net (Dec 9) -- UN World Summit of the Information Society (WSIS) brings together mor than 130 of the world’s governments to discuss the Internet and technology. "Thorny issues like internet governance, security, intellectual property, open source software, and not least, who should pay for new infrastructure and technology in the developing world, are on the programme. " There's not much agreement on anything.
In whose ‘domain’ is the world wide web? - By Abigail Fernandes. The Asian Age (Dec 2003)
There are more signs of internation opposition to ICANN's dominance in managing the Internet. Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is a private company in the U.S. that was set up by the U.S. Government in 1988 to oversee the domain name system and IP addresses.
"An expected 5,000 representatives from intra-governmental, business and non-profit organisations are expected to try and devise an action plan for addressing issues regarding the Internet like how to close the digital divide, supervise the Internet and deal with problems like spam and pornography on the Web. A principal point of debate will be if the Internet should be overseen by the UN instead of American groups like Icann."
Micromedia has a page of Free Studies About NextGen Behaviors. Articles relate mainly to use of the Internet by young people.
Internet References Are Frequently Lost, Says Study By University of Colorado Health Sciences Center Ascribe (Oct 30, 2003) -- Dr. Robert Dellavalle and colleagues at CU-Health Sciences Center's Department of Dermatology have found a high rate of dying links in scientific papers. "Internet references accounted for 2.6 percent of all references in a sample of more than 1000 articles published between 2000 and 2003 in three journals: The New England Journal of Medicine, The Journal of the American Medical Association and Science. In articles up to only 27 months old, 13 percent of Internet references were inactive, making substantial amounts of information unavailable."
Brewster Kahle, of the Internet Archive in San Francisco, said to the Washington Post. "The average lifespan of a Web page today is 100 days. This is no way to run a culture."
On the Web, Research Work Proves Ephemeral Electronic Archivists Are Playing Catch-Up in Trying to Keep Documents From Landing in History's Dustbin By Rick Weiss (Nov 24, 2003)
Who Runs the .GOV and .EDU Domains? By George Plosker. SearchDay (Nov 12) .Gov is restricted to U.S. government and .Edu to U.S. educational institutions. "... the sponsoring organization for .edu is EDUCAUSE and the sponsoring organization for .gov is the U.S. General Services Administration.".
This article suggests that the Web won't reach 11 billion pages until 2006 and that it is growing at roughly 34% a year. Will Google index all of it or be particular about quality?
Google to Index the Entire Internet in 2006 (Nov03, 2003 ) chriSEO - no supporting data given.
Most countries' websites ignored AP in Globe and Mail (Nov 5) -- "The United States led the rankings of e-government "readiness," or the amount of information, services and products offered over the Internet combined with the infrastructure — such as telephones, computers and Internet connections — needed to access them. Sweden ranked second, followed by Australia, Denmark, Great Britain, Canada, Norway, Switzerland, Germany and Finland."
Internet littered with dead Web sites Associated Press via Globe and Mail -- Weblogs are probably worse than web sites -- "One study of 3,634 blogs found that two-thirds had not been updated for at least two months and a quarter not since Day One."
Cyberatlas has summarized the comScore Media Metrix reports on Traffic Patterns of September 2003 Time on the Internet at work rose 5%, and dropped 1.6% at home. Top 5 properties were MSN, AOL, Yahoo, EBay and Google.
Europe, U.S. on Different Sides of the Gender Divide By Robyn Greenspan. Cyberatlas (OCt 21) Fifty two percent of Internet users in the U.S. are women compared to only 42% of European users. This chart shows percentages by country with Sweden the highest at 46% and Italy lowest at 38%.
Also, in the U.S. while women generate more traffic they spend less frequently than men and buy different things. More proof that the online life is merely an extension of the one offline.
Let private sector run the Net By Charles Cooper CNET News.com (October 17, 2003) -- More fallout from Site Finder, introduced by VeriSign to redirect people when they hit a "no such address" error. VeriSign CEO Stratton Sclavos has words for the governing body ICANN.
"But the controversy attending the dispute over the Site Finder service revealed a deeper split between technologists who helped guide the Internet in its infancy and the businesspersons who later realized the platform's commercial possibilities. After spending much of the last couple of weeks explaining his company's position, Sclavos believes that this cultural divide is a big reason why VeriSign has not received a terribly sympathetic hearing. "
Biz Leaders Prefer Web By Robyn Greenspan. CyberAtlas (Oct 3) Studies by Survey.com show that executives use the Web -- "with 51 percent of executives naming it as the most important business information resource. "
Copyright Issues Present Ongoing Dilemma: To Link or Not To Link? by Robert I Berkman and Christopher A Shumway, Online Journalism Review (OCt 1)
Article examines the arguments surrounding the ethics and legality of linking to web pages. It seems accepted that linking to a home page is ok, but linking to specific content pages without permission might not be. News stories, as an example, are really copyrighted material and not public domain.
The article is an edited excerpt from the book "Digital Dilemmas: Ethical Issues for Online Media Professionals," published in Aug. 2003 by Iowa State Press.
How Will "Smart Mobs" Play Out? Business Week (Sept 25) Howard Rheingold sees a trend in the use of mobile phones with the Internet. There may be some opportunity for new businesses, but Rheingold thinks it will more likely start in China or Brazil.
Marcus Zillman has opened a weblog about Internet demographics at http://www.internetdemographics.info/. This is being powered by a "subject tracer bot". There are other subjects being covered through bots listed at The Virtual Private Library.
Surfers shift to an Internet built for speed by Victoria Shannon/IHT International Herald Tribune. (Sept 17)
International Telecommunications Union found that one in ten Internet users around the world is using broadband. Number of people using broadband grew by 72% in the last year. Top per capita users were South Korea, Hong Kong, and Canada. United States was 11th. Most subscribers (94%) are in high-income areas.
SBC Yahoo's new look for fall by Jim Hu. CNet (Sep 16)
"Yahoo and SBC Communications launched an updated version of their joint Internet access services on Tuesday, in a move that mirrors similar enhancements by competitors America Online and MSN. "
AOL, MSN, and Yahoo race to provide broadband, content, and features to their communities of users.
Use of the Internet During Times of Crisis: An Expert Interview With David W. Crippen, MD by Alfred J. Saint Jacques, Medscape (Sep 12) How people have used the International Critical Care Internet Discussion Group (CCM-L), during crises.
Online News Pioneers See Lots of Changes in the First 10 Years by Mark Glaser. OJR (Sep 5) Panel discusses web journalism - John Battelle, Ana Marie Cox, Dave Winer, Craig Newmark, Bernard Gwertzman - all with extensive experience in online publications or content sites. Reviews early use of online news, importance of weblogs and RSS today, free v for-fee, and notable new developments.
Ana Marie Cox -- "...I think what's really revolutionary about Weblogs isn't their content, but the way that Weblog software has enabled technically unsophisticated people to produce aesthetically pleasing, well-organized Web sites."
Study: Boomers Still Prefer Printed Pages by Anick Jesdanun. AP via Silicon Valley (Sep 4) -- In the older tech elite (ages 42 to 62) 44% go online for news but 60% get a newspaper. Article contrasts boomers to younger generation. Data was from an upcoming Pew Internet and American Life study.
Sweden is considered the "web savviest" and strongest IT nation. Newest users are in Spain. Robyn Greenspan reports on Tracking the Experienced Users in CyberAtlas (Aug 27).
Article also references the recent Pew Internet and AMerican Life Project that studied online tenure in the United States. Capital region around Washington DC and the Pacific Northwest had the highest percentage of experienced users and the Midwest the highest percentage of newbies.
University of Michigan has released results on its annual American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) study. Report looks at ebusiness including search engines, portals, and news sites. Google was a top performer in the search engine category with a score of 82, and Yahoo second as a portal with 78. In news, MSNBC and ABCNews were rated at 74, with CNN and USAToday at 72. University of Michigan Releases American Customer Satisfaction Index. EContent (Aug 22)
Toni Fitzgerald at Media Life Magazine noted that As search engines advance, portals decline (Aug 18). Satisfaction with search engines increased to a score of 78, and portals like Yahoo, AOL, and MSN rose slightly to 70.
"Portals are best for general queries and varied information. But web users looking for more specialized answers are using search engines in increasing numbers and it would seem, with increasing success."
Average use from home in July was 26 hours per month, and 31 sessions. At work was higher -- nearly 76 hours/month, 67 sessions.
American Customer Satisfaction Index Q2, 2003: Manufacturing Durables and E-Business August 20, 2003 by Professor Claes Fornell
Internet or Web? There's a difference by Carl Smith. Popular Science via CNN.com (Aug 12)
"The Internet, of course, is the maze of phone and cable lines, satellites, and network cables that interconnect computers around the world. The Web is the name given to anything on the Internet that can be accessed using a Uniform Resource Locator, or URL. "
New top-level domain goes .pro CNet News (Aug 8) -- RegistryPro is looking for doctors, lawyers, and accountants to take out .pro domain names. Golf and tennis pros need not apply
Music: Downloaders Disregard Legal, Copyright Issues by Robyn Greenspan. Cyberatlas. (Aug 1) Jupiter Research sees online music tripling by 2008 to $3.3 billion. Pew Internet Project found that downloaders aren't concerned about copyright.