Click by Bill Tancer

Author:Bill Tancer
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781401395339
Publisher: Hyperion

JUST THIS LAST YEAR I was faced with a fear, the fear of failing at a very specific task. I had just gotten off the phone with the managing editor at TIME.com, the online component of the magazine. Having read my blog posts on Internet data and talked with a colleague, Josh, the editor, wanted to know if I was interested in writing a weekly column. Was I ever! But wait, there was one glaring problem: I was at best an amateur writer, had never taken a journalism class; I was clearly not a writer by trade, and I had never written a column. TIME, one of the most well known and prominent periodicals in the United States, wanted to know if I was interested in writing a column; to say I was intimidated would be an understatement. Right after hanging up the phone with Josh, having told him that I was very interested, I instinctively typed the Google URL into my browser, and without even thinking, I placed my cursor in the empty search box and typed “how to write a magazine column.”

Search engines have gone beyond serving the simple purpose of finding information or navigating to a website. Increasingly engines such as Google, Yahoo! Search, and the other thousand-some-odd search sites are serving as a source of knowledge and learning. Sitting around viewing the “fear of” queries, the analyst team and I brainstormed for other interesting phrases to study. When we investigated the idea of “how to” queries, we were astonished by the volume that this phrase represented. “How to” queries represented nearly 3 percent of all search queries in the United States, making it the most commonly searched question, and for that matter, phrase, entered into search engines. “How to” searches also have seasonal patterns that coincide with the school calendar, with a peak that always occurs during the summer months, and then a subsequent decrease during winter vacation and spring break. And while 3 percent may not sound like a large volume of searches, considering the hundreds of millions of queries that pass through search-engine servers each day, 3 percent is a shockingly high number.

While I really do love analyzing search lists and looking for patterns of behavior, when I saw before me a list of the more than 130,000 “how to” searches the Hitwise system had captured in a four-week period, the task seemed insurmountable.

I started at the top. The number one “how to” query, holding that position consistently over the last two years, was “how to tie a tie.” This one data point seemed odd. Of all of the questions, things we’d like to know how to do, is tying a tie really on top of our list? My first question was: Is this a U.S. phenomenon? In contrast to the United States, a quick check of our UK database put “how to tie a tie” in the number fifty-one position. In Australia, “how to tie a tie” was closer to U.S. data, below “how to vote” and “how to write a resume.

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