[EMAIL PROTECTED] (Kerry Miller) wrote:
> But but but! Youre all the time telling me that the consumer
> determines the market! Surely in a medium where every act --
> every click -- is recordable, the time-and-motion experts (or their
> digital counterparts) could make a damn good guess whether one's
> lingering on a URL before coming back for another indicates it was
> relevant or not. I.e., in place of your chronic depression, isnt the
> explanation that it would require a (packet sniffing?) search engine
> site to *follow the user to see whether the delay is because s/he's
> stopped there, or gone on to another link (or jumped ab novo to
> another site) before coming back? And that that sort of tracing is
> of course *unthinkable* -- at least as of 10 May 99?
I didn't say this was impossible. I said it was very difficult. Among
other things, it requires processing of massive volumes of data over long
periods of time. Furthermore, the nature of such studies is itself
controversial because of people's feelings about privacy.
I'm not sure what you mean by "my chronic depression."
--gregbo
