"Online, the social fears show up much higher."
Bill Tancer Uses the Web to Capture Human Nature

Sunday, September 7, 2008

Think your furtive late-night Googling is private? As global research manager for the online intelligence firm Hitwise, Bill Tancer creeps into our computers to study the psychology of our searches. His first book, "Click: What Millions of People Are Doing Online and Why It Matters," has just hit the shelves.

-- Monica Hesse

What do people want to know about the presidential candidates?

On the McCain side, there's a search fascination with his daughter, Meghan, and the fact that she had lunch with Heidi Montag at Ivy in Santa Monica.

Out of 1,900 different searches related to Obama, the number seven term was "Obama Antichrist." . . . The search has been around for several weeks and seems to be increasing. Seventeen percent of searchers end up at Snopes, the urban legend site. . . . It says the rumor is false.

Politics aside, are there other things we search for on a seasonal basis?

Engagement rings are an interesting example. Searches for rings spike the week before Thanksgiving. My analyst who discovered that pattern has an ultimatum theory: Girl bringing home Guy for the holiday initiates "the talk," tells him they have to be engaged or they're through.

And the engagement ring spike is followed by a surge in pregnancy searches around the first of January?

We followed the bread-crumb trail and looked at the sites searchers were visiting in January. Turns out, they were dominated by women in the 35-44 age group. . . . We think these January [pregnancy] searchers might be career women who have been putting off families, who maybe thought, "You know what? Let's make this a goal this year."

In offline surveys, people listed their top phobias as expected things: bugs, heights and closed spaces. Online, people's top phobia searches were things like fear of rejection, intimacy and people.

Online, the social fears show up much higher. . . . And that makes sense -- if you had a social phobia, you'd be less likely to participate in a survey to begin with. And if you did, you wouldn't want to admit it. If you get down to the tail of our online fear list, it's absolutely fascinating. I wouldn't imagine someone publicly admitting to fear of elbows, but it's on our list. Or fear of ceiling fans. Fear of bellybutton lint is on there, too.