Internet offers many sites for enterprising cyber-snoops

Sex sites are a mainstay on the Internet, but according to a recent study ("From E-Sex to E-Commerce: Web Search Changes" Computer, March 2002, pp.107-109), people using Web search engines are less interested in pornography and more concerned with business, careers and travel than they were a few years ago. The study analyzed data culled from more than 1 million queries submitted by more than 200,000 users of the Excite (http://www.excite.com) search engine, collected in September 1997, December 1999 and May 2001. This longitudinal benchmark study reveals that public Web searching is changing—it shows that search topics have shifted from sex and entertainment to commerce and people.

Despite the drop indicated by the Computer study, sex-related terms remain quite popular among Internet searchers. A 2-year study by Alexa Research http://cyberatlas.internet.com/big_picture/traffic_patterns/article/0,,5931_588851,00.html reveals that the word "sex" is still the most popular term people search for online. "Porn" (along with "porno" and "pornography") was the fourth most popular search term. Variations on the words "nude," "erotic" and "playboy" also placed among the 20 most popular search terms. And even though jobs and travel are important to people, the Lycos 50 http://50.lycos.com/ shows that titans of entertainment, such as Britney Spears and Jennifer Lopez, are on a lot of people's minds.

Are you interested in what people are searching for on the Internet? If so, there are several sites that offer the cyber-snoop the opportunity to view search requests being entered by users into Web search-engine boxes. One such site is MetaCrawler Metaspy http://www.metaspy.com/. Metaspy offers two views into users' searches—one a filtered service and the other, called "MetaSpy Exposed," provides a "no-holds-barred" (unfiltered) look at the search queries of MetaCrawler users; both views automatically refresh every 15 seconds. Ask Jeeves, a popular question-answering search engine, also offers a voyeuristic search tool called "Ask Jeeves Peek Through the Keyhole" http://www.askjeeves.com/docs/peek/. To see what search topics are hot at Yahoo! go to "Yahoo Buzz Index" http://buzz.yahoo.com/, and fans of Google should check out "Google Zeitgeist" http://www.google.com/press/zeitgeist.html. An extensive list of cyber-snooping sites can be found at What People Search For http://searchenginewatch.com/facts/searches.html.

The ability to see what people are searching for via popular search engines can be very enlightening—clearly, people are obsessed with sex, money and entertainment, but the thing that is revealed most about users of Internet search engines is—they can't spell!

—Gemma DeVinney and Don Hartman, University Libraries