The end of the year saw all the search engines roll out their lists of top search terms. Here are the links: Google, Yahoo, Ask Jeeves, AOL and Lycos

These are all very interesting - but the problem with them is that they are highly filtered - to remove adult terms and navigational terms. Yahoo doesn’t want to put out a press release saying that Google is one of it’s top search terms or vice versa. So what would an unfiltered list look like? It happens that we have some data to produce one.

Although most of SLI’s business is focused on providing site search and related services, we do have a portion of our business that provides services to web search companies. Typically this is providing Related Searches. When someone does a search on one of our Related Search customers’ sites (such as search.com) the query is sent to us and we return related search terms that are incorporated into the page. This means we are getting 10’s of millions of web search queries every day. By analyzing the logs we can get a list of our own. Here it is in it’s unfiltered glory:

google
rss
holiday ideas
porn
search engines
yahoo
sex
ebay
89.com
free porn
free email
white pages
find email address
people finder
email
email extractor lite
email addresses
people search
yahoo mail
hotels
ebusiness
games
business
yahoo.com
milf
email search
email address directory
mapquest
episodes
find people
myspace.com
literotica
lyrics
myspace
mail
free bulk email
dictionary
yahoo email
email directory
email marketing

So there you have it - people search for porn and uninteresting things like search engines and email providers.

I remember when we powered the search for snap.com (the old snap - not the new one) we wondered what we should possibly show people when they search for snap. Of course we let the learning decide that and the most popular result was snap.com. So these people would start off at snap.com, search for snap, and click on snap.com. You would wonder what they were thinking. That’s just the tip of the iceberg. Looking at search queries is always interesting and often perplexing. It’s even more interesting when they are queries that people are typing into your own site search. Do you know what the top search terms are for your site? You should.

This entry was posted by Shaun Ryan on Wednesday, January 18th, 2006 at 11:34 am PST and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.