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Internet Statistics

"America Attacked"

[ Up ] [ Statistics, "America Attacked" ] [ Statistics: Taliban, Osama bin Laden ] [ Statistics updated ]

 

News Analysis

This has been a truly awful week for us all, and the beginning of a longer awful period in our lives.  We have all been consumed by the horrendous terrorist events in the Northeast United States.  Our hearts go out to all who suffered direct losses of family, friends, and loved ones on Tuesday.  We have all lost something.

 

As this is a website devoted to business and technology, which certainly includes the Internet, I thought my readers might have an interest in some statistics I have received about recent activity on the Internet.

The Report

 I got a report on the top 300 terms searched for in the last 24 hours, and a report on the top 200 terms searched for in the last 60 days.  The e-mail containing the report is dated September 15 at 11:46 p.m.

 

The searches are compiled from the largest Metacrawlers, such as Dogpile, and include 5,581,719 queries for 24 hours and 314,258,732 for the 60 days.  (A Metacrawler is a search engine that returns results from a number of different search engines.  In other words, it submits your search to several other engines, combines the results, and returns them to you.)  The focus of the searches for these two periods was substantially different.

 

The first thing I might note about these numbers is that the average queries per day for the 60-day period is 5,237,645.  (Remember that these are queries tabulated from large Metacrawlers.  They represent only a small portion of the total traffic over the Internet.)  I was a little surprised that the number following this event was not much larger than the average for the two months.  Since the amount of activity did not increase significantly, this must mean that roughly the same users diverted their attention to different matters.

 

The “Top 300” terms accounted for 4.75 percent of the total searches (265,313 searches) for the 24 hours, while the “Top 200” was 2.61% of the 60 day total (5,587,921).

The Analysis

I summarized the searches into a few categories for simplicity and to eliminate the impact of different spellings for essentially the same search (for example, “Osama bin Laden” showed up as “usama bin laden”, “Osama Bin Laden”, “Osama Bin Ladin”, and other variations, all of which clearly had the same intent.)  This group alone (Osama bin Laden) accounted for 8.15% of the top 300, or 0.39% of the total searches in 24 hours.

 

In all, I estimated that 70.27% of the top 300 searches were devoted to topics related to the events of September 11.  The terms I counted in that group ranged from Afghanistan to the World Trade Center, to searches for news and newspapers and maps.  I included searches pertaining to “Nostradamus” and “prophecies” because of a hoax going around the Internet indicating that Nostradamus had predicted the event. 

 

Nostradamus was a French physician and astrologer who lived from 1503 to 1566 and dabbled in prophecy. His volume Centuries, a big set of vague and sometimes cataclysmic predictions set in rhyme, made quite a hit in his day.  His name comes up often in relation to cataclysmic events that someone wants to tell us we should have foreseen.  Searches for this group accounted for 16.43% of the top 300, or 0.78% of the total for the period.  His name, or “prophecies” was searched for 43,600 times.  I am not sure what this says about the demographics of the Internet community.

Summary

My findings are summarized in the table below:

 

Search terms

Number

% of top 300

% of total searches

Osama bin Laden

21,610

5.33

0.25

Nostradamus, prophecies, etc.

43,600

16.43

0.78

Afghanistan, terror, Taliban

12,000

4.52

0.21

Wide range of terms including newspapers & other media, World Trade Center, Pentagon, New York, Cantor Fitzgerald, and so on.

95,094

35.84

1.70

Maps & airlines

14,141

5.33

0.25

Total

186,445

70.27

3.34

 

The only significant overlap I found between the 24 hour summary and the 60 day total was that for maps and airlines.  These were 0.11% of the total searches in the 60 day total (versus 0.25% in 24 hours), indicating that the interest in that topic doubled in response to the recent events.  Osama bin Laden, Afghanistan, and Nostradamus did not make it into the top 200 for the last 60 days, but they dominated the last 24 hours (essentially the 15th of September.)  I suspect they dominated the Internet from the 11th through the 15th as well.

Conclusion

What does all this mean?  One thing it indicates to me is that the Internet is currently being used as a real source of information on topics of interest to the community.  One might say, “Of course, it goes without saying!”  The reason it interests me is that I keep hearing from many people who cite current research articles and studies saying that search engines are not the source for most traffic to web sites.  These numbers tell me that people have to continue to use search engines to find the information that they want to have access to.

 

This is certainly in line with my personal experience and use of the Internet.  I may not be typical, but I will go on the Internet before I will pick up a dictionary to look up a word.  Having high speed access changed my behavior, as it will the behavior of many others in the future.

Why is it of interest?

Why do we care about any of this?  The Internet is still new, and we are learning about how it is used, and how it is used is changing constantly.  This is a new world to everyone, and we do not know yet how it will affect all our lives.  This little survey of mine is just one more window on the present that may help us to understand where we are going with this technology.

[ Up ] [ Statistics, "America Attacked" ] [ Statistics: Taliban, Osama bin Laden ] [ Statistics updated ]

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