Barack beats Britney

Stephen Withers
Wednesday, 03 December 2008 06:53

Opinion and Analysis

And if you were to tell me there are demographic differences between people who mostly use Google search and those who prefer Yahoo!, I wouldn't think you were crazy. Sure, I'd want some evidence before I believed you, but it isn't an outlandish notion.

Hmm... a quick search for "google yahoo demographics" points to research showing that Yahoo! users are more likely to be young and female, compared with Google's older, richer and male profile.

So if we're talking stereotypes, that might explain the preponderance of celebrities on Yahoo!'s list.

But were lots of people really searching for 'facebook' and 'youtube' as suggested by the Zeitgeist list?

I doubt it. My guess is many of them accidentally typed into their browser's search box instead of the URL box. For example, typing att into some browsers will take you to www.att.com - a convenient shortcut.

Or some may be using browsers that don't work that way, so they're using the search box to allow a mouse click in the results list instead of typing those extra characters.

Anyway, I'm off to find out who David Cook is (or was), and to investigate why "surf the channel" appeared on Google's list.