Mining AOL's search data
Aside from the obvious privacy angle on AOL's recent release of the search records from 650,000 of its customers, some interesting data has begun to surface from those brave souls willing to sift through the 17+ million searches.
The Wall Street Journal has an interesting article today detailing some of the trends found in that data. Among the most interesting points:
- The top ten words searched for were:
- free
- new
- lyrics
- county
- school
- city
- home
- state
- pictures
- music
- In 47% of all searches, users did not click on any of the links presented to them
- When users did click on a search result, they choose the first site listed 42% of the time
When considering this data, it's important to keep in mind that it contains only the search records of AOL users, so this shouldn't be expected to represent the search habits of more technically adept users. It does give some insights into the search behavior of a great many users, though, and it's worth paying attention to.
Most notable is the importance of ranking in the number one spot for a given search term. With 42% of clicks going to the top result, it's obvious that there's a huge difference in traffic between simply being on the first page of results and gaining that number one spot. The number 10 listing might still get decent traffic for a common search phrase, but for less common niches number one is the only place to be.
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