davehora.com

One of the cool blogs I keep up with is Hitwise Analyst Weblogs. It’s basically a collection of their analysts’ blogworthy insights. Some of the results that come out of investigating search data and web habits turn out to be pretty neat, and are often ways of pointing out trends that would be otherwise difficult to spot. Results aren’t just limited to how people search the web, but can explore how people use the web to do whatever they’d like to do.

A great example here is traffic analysis of the NCAA’s March Madness on Demand service at the beginning of the tournament. Heather Dougherty points out in the post that the longest duration visits and highest traffic points were a spike in the middle of the work week (March 19th was a Wednesday). As people are able to catch up with the games at home, on a regular television, MMOD traffic decreases.

I’m sure the datasets available to those at Hitwise prove to be massively useful for finding out all sorts of interesting information with some data mining know-how. Besides the March Madness post, truly interesting data is discussed, and enough information is harvested to provide “insights on how 10 million US Internet users interact with more than 1 million websites, across 165+ industries,” if the Hitwise website tells the truth.

For me, Google Trends does the job when I’m wondering about important things like iPhone hype vs. worldwide fascination with the trainwreck that calls itself Britney Spears’ career. Check it out. There’s no info about duration of visit, and if you bring it down to the last-30-days level you can’t get much detail, but it’s still fairly useful information we’ve got here:

• Mexico and Canada are much more concerned with Britney Spears than the iPhone. Maybe this speaks to where Apple didn’t initially focus iPhone marketing, or, more likely, how much Mexico and Canada love Britney Spears.
• Britney’s highest search share (Google News archives point out that the late November ‘06 peak was probably her divorce) is higher than the iPhone’s highest search share. Important Britney-related news is much more important than iPhone info.
• Spanish speakers care twice as much about Britney Spears as they do the iPhone.

If my informal and untrained analysis of this data tells us anything, it’s that the world loves Britney Spears, especially Spanish-speaking Mexicans.