For those of you who often find yourselves wondering how the hell it is that people make their way around the Internet without ever reading their search results, I suggest you go to AOL's database of search results from specific users which it recently put up online, and search for number 711391. It's a magnificent case study in how some people use search engines. What I want to know is how and why they come to use them this way; I know my own use of search strings is significantly different. (For one thing, I don't feed search engines my cries for help, or even questions worded as such.)
I've been in the Google offices and seen their scrolling wall of real-time search terms, and I can tell you these are more or less par for the course. The amazing thing is seeing one person's searches play themselves out over time. As Bakon says:
I can't even explain how overwhelming it is--it's an incredibly heartbreaking and bizarre blend of vanity, "Christian" values, insecurity, sexual manipulation, and something akin to a descent into madness. It's like Dostoevsky meets the world wide internets, except worse, because you know it's all true.
Thanks to Bakon for pointing this particular thread out.
Posted by Gus at August 20, 2006 02:40 PMIt's a magnificent case study in how some people use search engines. What I want to know is how and why they come to use them this way
The hypothesis that they work shouldn't be discounted based on 711391. Work in the way that computational linguists think of search engines working that is: that they are a function that maps your query to a web page which has some high level of relevance to you (as judged by you, this is the ideal Platonic search engine I'm talking about) in some incredibly short amount of time. That query probably does match words found on pages about sleep apnea, in fact, it sounds like a good match for advertising language for sleep clinics.
In fact, in general, search engine designers are caught between the potential usefulness of full natural language sentences as queries and the stubborn refusal of sophisticated search engine users to use anything other than keywords. They might be relieved to see actual phrases occuring, leaving aside the waves of human despair the actual meaning of them contains.
Posted by: Mary at August 20, 2006 6:57 PM
I think you could edit that search history down a bit and send it to someplace like the New Yorker -- it's got a plot full of just the kind of bleak sexual desperation they like in a short story. Or, seriously, Harper's.
Posted by: Roger at August 23, 2006 7:38 PM