Agenda Inc (via Smart Mobs):
"Twenty percent of all searching was sex-related back in 1997; now it's about 5 percent," said Amanda Spink, the University of Pittsburgh professor who co-authored Web Search: Public Searching of the Web with Penn State professor Bernard J. Jansen. "People are using (the web) more as an everyday tool rather than as just an entertainment medium."Wired News carries the report to which Agenda Inc links:
Experts aren't surprised by the results. "They're not getting excited about using the internet anymore," Barry Wellman, a University of Toronto cyberspace researcher, said of the findings. "Remember when cars came out, and people would say, 'Wow, we're going for a ride today!' Now they just go for a ride."Or go shopping. Spink said her studies show queries for e-business or commerce increased by 86 percent in the past seven years. …
What hasn't changed much in seven years is how hard people are willing to work at searching. The answer: not very. Spink and Jansen found that people averaged about two words per query and two queries per search session. "The searches are taking less than five minutes, and they're only looking at the first page of results," Spink said. "That's why people are wanting to get their results on the first page" of search engine results.
