The most striking discovery in their research was that an alarming number of users are not particularly skilled in reaching their online destinations. Many portals were reached by typing the web address into the search engine as opposed to directly into the address field. In short, people searched for AOL by aol, aol.com and www.aol.com; yahoo was searched for as yahoo, yahoo.com and www.yahoo.com; hotmail and ebay were searched for using similar methods. This amazing discovery seems to suggest that even though more people own PCs and have Internet access, they don't seem to understand how these technologies work.
The popularity of sex terms probably isn't surprising. Sex was the top search term, comprising 0.3289% of all searches (or roughly 1 in every 300 terms). But we may not be as driven by our carnal impulses as it may look: according to the firm, the top 50 search terms account for less than 3% of all search terms views. We have some varied interests, to be sure. But they also point out that the 50 most popular Web sites receive 25 percent of the traffic. In spite of how varied out searching tastes may be, the Web is a lot more concentrated. We keep coming back to the same sites.
What, out of curiosity, were the most searched terms for the rest of 2001? The table below shows the top terms on two popular search engines (terms are ranked).
| Lycos | Yahoo |
| Dragonball | Playstation 2 |
| Britney Spears | Britney Spears |
| Napster | WWF |
| Tattoos | Dragon Ball Z |
| Osama Bin Laden | Napster |
| IRS | World Trade Center |
| Pokemon | Harry Potter & the Sorcerer's Stone |
| World Trade Center | Dale Earnhardt |
| Nostradamus | NASCAR |
| WWF | Internal Revenue Service |
Some terms were more popular on one site than the other, but the table offers some insight into our preoccupations: online game playing (Dragonball, Playstation 2), celebrities (Britney Spears, Dale Earnhardt), researching information (IRS), or current events (Osama Bin Laden, World Trade Center).
Another point to make here: many of these terms speak to the interests of children. We've seen elsewhere in this chapter how children have taken to the Internet. Terms such as Dragonball and Harry Potter & the Sorcerer's Stone show how willing and adept children are at researching their interests.
Sources: "Search Engines, Browsers Still Confusing Many Web Users." Retrieved February 6, 2002 from the World Wide Web: http://www.cyberatlas.internet.com; "Lycos Web Most Wanted." Retrieved online at: http://50.lycos.com; "Search Day." Retrieved online: http://www.searchenginewatch.com.
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