[ via fleshbot.com: in-search-of-Britney's-crotch saga. /m ]


Yahoo's Porn-Free List Of Top 10 Searches For 2006

But the question remains: Just how are these lists put together?

By Thomas Claburn,  InformationWeek
Dec. 5, 2006
URL: http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml? 
articleID=196601720



Yahoo today released its Top 10 Searches for 2006, and once again pop  
singer Britney Spears reigns supreme. "Britney Spears" has been the  
leading query for the past five years, having only been dethroned  
briefly in 2004 by Paris Hilton.

Editors, it turns out, have a hand in supporting the Spears regime.  
Yahoo's list, like certain celebrities best left unnamed, has gone  
under the knife for the sake of appearance. Unseemly search terms  
have been unceremoniously excised.

"There is some filtering done," says Yahoo Buzz editor Heather  
Moylan. "The adult terms are filtered out."

How manipulated are the results by bots—or publicists? Moylan says  
she'll have to check on that. "These results are pretty pure," she  
insists. "They're pretty true to user interest. But there are  
filters, and we're aware of those efforts."

Moylan says she'll check with Yahoo's engineers about the extent of  
those efforts. In fairness, it's not clear that any such efforts are  
being made. But given the prevalence of online fraud, it would be  
surprising to find an untouched Eden of pure statistics.

Whether to swallow something that's "pretty pure" depends on one's  
tolerance for contaminants. This is not to say that Yahoo's Top 10  
Searches doesn't have some value as a cultural yardstick, but as such  
it should be measured against other such lists.

Consider Yahoo's Top 10 Searches: Britney Spears, WWE, Shakira,  
Jessica Simpson, Paris Hilton, American Idol, Beyonce Knowles, Chris  
Brown, Pamela Anderson, and Lindsay Lohan.

Now compare that to the most popular search terms according to AOL,  
which mistakenly released millions of search queries earlier this  
year. The AOL Breach Top 10 queries are Google, eBay, Yahoo,  
Yahoo.com, Mapquest, Google.com, myspace.com, myspace, www.yahoo.com,  
and www.google.com.

Aside from revealing that many users can't tell a search dialogue box  
from a URL entry box, the AOL list shows a markedly different picture  
of what users are interested in. As a search query, "Britney Spears"  
isn't even in the top 200 terms in the AOL data sample.

That's not to say Spears isn't popular; she tops Google's list of  
popular search queries for the week of Dec. 2nd. But it does suggest  
that Yahoo and all the other search engines that compile such lists  
owe the Internet community a far more detailed explanation of how  
such lists get compiled and verified.

Copyright © 2006 CMP Media LLC







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