Wired has an article on the changing patterns of Internet use. One of the key changes? Less sex searching:
”Twenty percent of all searching was sex-related back in 1997; now it’s about 5 percent,” said Amanda Spink, the University of Pittsburgh professor who co-authored Web Search: Public Searching of the Web with Penn State professor Bernard J. Jansen.”It’s a little bit more in Europe, 8 to 10 percent, but in comparison to everything else, it’s a very small percent,” Spink said. ”People are using (the web) more as an everyday tool rather than as just an entertainment medium.”
Folks might recall a similar trend as home video evolved from a gee whiz, slightly seedy enterprise, to a standard household appliance.
Now that Internet use has reached almost 70 percent of the U.S. population (according to these statistics), it has become a standard and increasingly invisibly integrated part of daily life for many.
But among those money, the article also shows something hasn’t changed much:
What hasn’t changed much in seven years is how hard people are willing to work at searching. The answer: not very. Spink and Jansen found that people averaged about two words per query and two queries per search session.”The searches are taking less than five minutes, and they’re only looking at the first page of results,” Spink said.
So, the good news for arts organizations is that on-line connections to audiences and donors can be cheaper and quicker. The bad news is that the truly valuable real estate (the first page of the search engine results) is exceptionally small.
