Research Finds (Among Other Things) Shopping Tops Sex As Internet Search Topic

MILWAUKEE - People are still looking for love in all the wrong places, but even more (percentage-wise) are using the Internet to go shopping.

That's one conclusion of a broad study of Internet searching, "From E-Sex to E-Commerce: Web Search Changes," by a University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee researcher.

Dietmar Wolfram, one of the study's four co-authors, studies infometrics - the quantitative study of how information is produced and used. "It can be fairly esoteric stuff," says Wolfram, an associate professor in the School of Information Studies. However, the E-Sex/E-Commerce study has attracted quite a bit of attention outside academic circles. "The media did tend to fixate on the `sex searching is down, shopping searching is up'" aspects of the research, he says.

The study was published in the March issue of Computer magazine. The story also has hit the mainstream media, with stories in the Wall Street Journal, Business Week, the Washington Post, U.S. News and World Report and others.

"I guess it's true that if you have a short title with `sex' in it, it does attract attention," says Wolfram wryly.

The study's major goal was to look at how people search the Internet in real life situations, using real query data, says Wolfram. Much of the previous user search behavior research has been based on observations of people in highly controlled environments like labs, he says. "We wanted to look at how people searched in normal situations."

The study was done in collaboration with researchers from Penn State University, the U.S. Army War College, and Rutgers University. It analyzed data from more than one million queries submitted by more than 200,000 users of the Excite Web search engine at several points during a four-year period. The goal of the research was to find out how the public's use of web searches is evolving, says Wolfram. An obvious application of such research is to develop ways to make it easier for users to search for information on the Web.

One of the study's several findings was that the use of "sex" as a search term dropped from one in six queries in 1997 to one in 12 in 2001, with many of those related to human sexuality, rather than pornography. At the same time, search terms like "commerce," "people," "travel" and "employment" moved closer to the top of the list of most frequently used terms. Overall, sex/pornography and entertainment-related queries dropped compared to travel, employment, people and computer-related queries.

The apparent drop in interest in sex-related searching is probably related to the growth of commercial content on the Web as the Internet evolves from an entertainment to a business medium, according to the researchers. "The actual numbers (of sex-related queries) may be going up," says Wolfram, "but the proportion is going down."

The researchers also found that users preferred to keep their searches short and simple, often using only one query terms per search, and they didn't have much patience for wading through multiple pages of results.

Because many users continue to use only one simple query, information providers can probably expect to reach many web users with high frequency words like "free," "sex", "games," "weather" and "maps," according to the research.

Although users did increase the use of Boolean operators (words like "and," "or," "not," and other terms that modify or limit a search), users seem to want to keep their searches simple, with relatively few incorporating advanced search features. "The average user on the Internet is not going to construct very elaborate queries," says Wolfram.

At the same time, he emphasizes, that analysis of pairs of words like "real" and "estate" or "adult" and "education" may give researchers a more exact picture of what users are really looking for than focusing on single terms.

Web users are increasingly impatient, and want very targeted results, the researchers found. In 1997, 29 percent of Excite users looked at only one page (about 10 sites) of results; by 2001, that number was 50 percent. More than 70 percent only looked at the first two pages of results. That has implications for users and Web designers, says Wolfram. "The average user may look at only the items on the first one or two pages, but the best resource may be on the fourth page."

The researchers used Excite's search engine primarily because they could get access to the data on searches, says Wolfram. Most major search engines keep such data confidential to maintain their own competitive edge, says Wolfram. However, because Excite's search engine was similar to other major search engines, the researchers believe the data give a good snapshot of user behavior on all types of search engines.

The researchers respected user privacy, says Wolfram. "We couldn't look at the data and see that John Smith submitted a naughty search." The data the researchers worked with showed only an anonymous code, which the Excite server assigned to the user machine, the time of day, and the query--the terms the user entered.

The research results indicate that users need better search engines to help them find what they're looking for with less frustration. They also need to learn better search techniques.

"Search engines are getting more powerful and do a pretty good job of retrieving the information," says Wolfram. "We need to empower the system to make more decisions for the user (dealing with incorrect spellings, for example), but we also need to empower the user. Sometimes it's easy to forget most people don't really know how to do an efficient and effective search," says Wolfram.

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