Searching for People on the Web

Most people have used a name as the query in a search engine, either searching for a potential date, one's significant other, a long lost friend, a famous person, or a vanity search (i.e., searching for one's own online presence).

I was interested in how prevalent this behavior was and how folks did. It has a lot of privacy implications (i.e., a good way to identify a Web search engine user is by the names they search on), societal implications (i.e., who do folks consider important or interesting), and commercial value (i.e., tying names of people to particular commercial Web sites). So, I conducted a research study to investigate.

My co-researcher and I found that queries with names were about 4% of queries, with celebrity searching being about 25% of this traffic. 4% is actually a good percentage of searches, BTW. Most of these queries were just the name with no quotes or any additional identify terms.

Read the compete research on searching for people on the Web

It would be really interesting to redo the research now, as the data was from pre-Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. And, would be interesting to see how much of this is vanity searching.

The implications are for businesses that manage the online perception of others, which seems like a good commercial niche.