Legal Research

Book Review: Click: What Millions of People Are Doing Online and Why it Matters, Bill Tancer (2008)

I promised a full review of this book, so here goes.

First, I have to say that Click is, in effect, a 203-page advertisement for Hitwise, a firm that analyzes 10 million Internet users in the U.S.  But I’m totally OK with that, because they surely have all manner of cool data at their disposal.  Tancer is general manager of global research for Hitwise.  He gets to sift through search data to spot emerging trends and counterintuitive data points.  Here are a few questions he answers in Click:

• During what week of the year do most people search about depression and its treatment?
• On what day of the week do porn searches spike?
• How are visits to social networking sites and porn sites related?  Online poker and online sports betting sites?
• What’s the #1 political search term?
• During which months do searches for prom dresses spike?  (Hint: It happens twice a year, and different groups of people search for different reasons.)
• What is the most commonly-asked “how to” query?
• What percentage of Web surfers actually contribute content to Web 2.0 sites such as Flickr, Wikipedia, and YouTube?

If this was all Tancer covered in the book, I’d still gladly shell out the 17 bucks I paid for it on Amazon.  I teach adults how to use the Internet, so I need to keep on top of trends, even if they are of marginal use or interest to attorneys.  But there’s more to Click.  Tancer shows us that for the first time in history we are able to discover, in real time, what a huge group of people think and want and fear.  No more surveys.  No more focus groups.  Real data, showing what we are searching for.

John Battelle, in his book The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture (2005) talks about the Database of Intentions:

“This information represents, in aggregate form, a place holder for the intentions of humankind — a massive database of desires, needs, wants, and likes that can be discovered, subpoenaed, archived, tracked, and exploited to all sorts of ends.”  (page 6)

Tancer is the lucky guy who gets to mine it.  As he says at the end of Click:

“Simply stated, if you want to understand the new connected world and how we choose to live in it, look no further than our Internet behavior; after all, we are what we click.”

Full post as published by Jenkins Webblits on September 24, 2008 (boomark / email).