This may come as a bit of a shock to some people, but sex and porn aren’t exactly the prime search subjects online these days, if you believe a pair of researchers from the University of Pittsburgh and Penn State University who say sex searches have dropped considerably while business or e-commerce searches jumped in the same period.
"Twenty percent of all searching was sex-related back in 1997, now it's about 5 percent," said Amanda Spink of the University of Pittsburgh, who co-wrote "Web Search: Public Searching of the Web" with Bernard J. Jansen of Penn State. But she also said e-commerce and business searches jumped 86 percent in the same time frame.
And a number of analysts were not exactly surprised that Spink and Jansen produced the results they produced, in part because Netizens are coming more to see the Internet as a daily life supporter and not just an exotic entertainment resource. "It's a little bit more in Europe, 8-10 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."
"They're not getting excited about using the Internet anymore," said University of Toronto Internet researcher Barry Wellman. "Remember when cars came out, and people would say, 'Wow, we're going for a ride today!' Now they just go for a ride."
SearchEngineWatch.com was also impressed with the spike in business and e-commerce searching. "That makes sense because e-commerce in the last seven years has boomed," said news editor Gary Price.
