Drudge Report, Reality and How People Find Stuff Online

Frederic    web 2.0    

Here is a little blurb from the Drudge Report from today:

ONLINE NEWS RACE 6/16/07: YAHOO! TOPS MSNBC, CNN; 'DRUDGE REPORT' MORE SEARCHED THAN 'PARIS HILTON'...

That sounds as if more people were interested in the Drudge Report (#6) than Paris Hilton (#8) – an unlikely event. The actual data from Hitwise tells a somewhat different story (if you don’t want to open the PDF, I put the data after the break): People simply use Google instead of typing “.com” into their browser.

The number one search term is “weather”. Number four is “weather.com.” “TV Guide” is number nine. Out of the top twenty queries that lead users to news sites, only three are actual searches for news items ( “Paris Hilton,” “Sopranos, ” and “Vince McMahon” (no idea who that is)). Everything else is users searching for a specific site.

What can we learn from that? Real users don’t use bookmarks (let alone delicious). Real users don’t use URLs but just google a word.

And about Drudge and his metrics, check out this.

1. weather 0.59%
2. cnn 0.30%
3. sopranos 0.22%
4. weather.com 0.22%
5. msnbc 0.17%
6. drudge report 0.16%
7. news 0.15%
8. paris hilton 0.15%
9. tv guide 0.15%
10. usa today 0.14%
11. weather channel 0.14%
12. fox news 0.12%
13. drudge 0.12%
14. people 0.11%
15. people magazine 0.11%
16. consumer reports 0.10%
17. cnn.com 0.10%
18. google 0.10%
19. vince mcmahon 0.09%
20. ruth graham 0.09%
21. bbc 0.08%
22. abc news 0.08%
23. sajani shakya 0.08%
24. noaa 0.08%
25. horoscope 0.07%
26. the sopranos 0.06%
27. new york times 0.06%
28. cnn news 0.06%
29. immigration 0.06%
30. bbc news 0.06%

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