December 20, 2006 Comments
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It's the end of the year and the search engines are all busy releasing their "top searches of the year" lists. I ran a blog post that featured many of AOL's results just a week or so ago. Nicholas Carr has also put together a single blog post that outlines what each of the big three engines claim as their top ten searches of the year. But how accurate are these lists?
You see, it's kind of odd to me to think that the search engine's users can vary by SO much that there'd only be a single overlap in the three lists. Confused? Here, take a look at what each of the three engines sites claims were their top ten searches...
1. Bebo
2. Myspace
3. World Cup
4. Metacafe
5. Radioblog
6. Wikipedia
7. Video
8. Rebelde
9. Mininova
10. Wiki
1. Weather
2. Dictionary
3. Dogs
4. American Idol
5. Maps
6. Cars
7. Games
8. Tattoo
9. Horoscopes
10. Lyrics
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
Now, are we really supposed to believe that there's THAT much variation in what people are searching for at each engine? Think about it, those lists follow every single stereotype about the users of each engine (Yahoo users are all about entertainment, AOL users are total 'net newbies...).
There's an interesting take on these lists over at the Business 2.0 Beta blog.
Everyone knows these lists are essentially works of fiction produced by the search engines' PR departments. Note how Google describes its Zeitgeist:
Note that exquisitely parsed wording. Translation: "We scrolled down a list of the 1,000 most popular terms to find some that weren't the names of competitors and that we deemed to be safe for public consumption." Yahoo Buzz and AOL's Hot Searches are no better, of course.
It gets even more interesting. If you remember, AOL "accidentally" released all of its user data earlier this year. Not surprisingly, the top ten searches don't at all match up with what has been publicly released. Really though, what's the fun in saying that Google, eBay and Yahoo were the top search terms at your site if you're AOL? In fact, every single one of the top ten queries at AOL were for other web sites, not for topics.
You can also check the current most popular searches as recorded by Wordtracker and you'll see that they're far more in line ith the REAL AOL list than with the PR generated lists from these three sites.
So why not just do like Google and say that the list represents some of the most interesting searches of the year? Bah...where's the fun in that?
Jennifer Laycock is the Editor of Search Engine Guide, an educational web site aimed at translating the search marketing world into something that small business owners can understand. Jennifer specializes in common sense search engine marketing, viral marketing and customer outreach via social media and blogs. A former search marketing consultant and in-house trainer, Jennifer’s clients have included companies like Verizon, American Greetings and Highlights for Children. Her primary clients now are a little girl named Elnora and a little boy named Emmitt.
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