Top Searches of 2009
The top three search engines — Google, Yahoo! and Bing — all recently released their top searches of the year.
The only person to make all three lists? The King of Pop, of course… Michael Jackson.
But you can deduce a lot of information about the type of people who use each search engine by what the top searches were.
For example, with Google, here is the rest of the top five: 1) Twitter, 3) Facebook, 4) Hulu, and 5) Hi5.
As you can tell, Google is the destination for people who have yet to figure out that you can access websites by adding ".com" to the end of a word and typing it directly into your address bar — you know, that giant white space at the top of every browser window.
A quick check of seven of Yahoo's remaining top 10 tells you all you need to know about their average user: 2) Twilight, 3) WWE, 4) Megan Fox, 5) Britney Spears, 7) American Idol, 8) Kim Kardashian, and 9) NASCAR.
That's right… Yahoo is the primary search engine used at Brown University.
Bing's top 10 is the most confounding: 2) Twitter, 3) Swine Flu, 4) Stock Market, 5) Farrah Fawcett, 6) Patrick Swayze, 7) Cash for Clunkers, 8) Jon and Kate Gosselin, 9) Billy Mays, and 10) Jaycee Dugard.
At first, I didn't know what to make of it. Then I realized: Not enough people actually use Bing to make it a statistically significant survey.
It's Statistics 101, people. You can just throw that data out.
