The Year in Search: Dweebs, horndogs and geezers
Nick Carr, at Rough Type, has posted the top 10 search terms for the year from Google, Yahoo and AOL.
The amazing part is the lack of overlap among the three. The only term that appears on more than one list is "American Idol", which rates 6th on Yahoo and 4th on AOL.
I'm kind of surprised that Bebo is #1 on Google. Not so much that it outranked MySpace, whose traffic dwarfs that of Bebo, but that Google users would bother to use a search engine to locate a 4-letter URL. Also interesting is that video provider metacafe is on the list, but not YouTube. Is it the opposite of the Bebo issue? Has everyone already bookmarked YouTube or figured out how to type the domain name directly? Or is the fact that Time Magazine has taken notice an indication that YouTube has jumped the shark.
Nick's comments hit it pretty much on the head. Yahoo searches indicate 13-year old boys looking for half-naked photos of celebrities; Google is led by geeks searching for videos and social networking sites, while AOL's users are searching for categories of information, like horoscopes or dogs.
The full lists:
Google:
1. Bebo
2. Myspace
3. World Cup
4. Metacafe
5. Radioblog
6. Wikipedia
7. Video
8. Rebelde
9. Mininova
10. Wiki
Yahoo
1. Britney Spears
2. WWE
3. Shakira
4. Jessica Simpson
5. Paris Hilton
6. American Idol
7. Beyonce Knowles
8. Chris Brown
9. Pamela Anderson
10. Lindsay Lohan
AOL
1. Weather
2. Dictionary
3. Dogs
4. American Idol
5. Maps
6. Cars
7. Games
8. Tattoo
9. Horoscopes
10. Lyrics
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