Thursday, July 20, 2006

Sorting through Search Terms

I'm looking through the latest stats on who's serving what ads from Nielsen/NetRating. There's a chart of the top 25 companies by their top 3 search terms (scroll to the bottom of the page). Assumedly, these are the terms that bring the most traffic to the companies (right?). If so, the Web remains an odd wild place.

No...scratch that...the world remains an odd, wild place. The Battellian view of search engines as the database of intentions means that people's intentions are quite odd. Consider the following companies and their top search terms:
eBay: myspace, ebay, maps
Shopzilla: swimsuits, Pepsi Collectors Cans, tracphone
Amazon: books, haunted lighthouses, log splitters
Yahoo: free music, fireworks, mermaids
What an odd collection of terms. I also have to wonder about eBay getting clicks and serving ads for the term "myspace". I can't believe that that is truly a relevant ad. I looked on eBay. There are some Myspace-inspired t-shirts and things. But the engines must realize that this is supposed to be a direct navigation query.
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