Research performed at Queensland University of Australia in Brisbane, Australia, dumped a cold shower on the long-held perception that people do more searching for sex than they do for business or e-commerce ideas.
Instead of banging away at search engines for less than prurient topics, Professor Amanda Spinks found that searches for “business and commerce-related topics, including buying and selling on the net, had outstripped sex.” Thirty percent of web searches came from business-related probing for information.
Spinks’ research, performed in close contact with a project at Penn State University, looked at the searching habits of people in the US and Europe. Some 30 million sessions from a variety of search and metasearch sites, like Ask.com and Dogpile among others, comprised the test bed of data for the project.
In the study, business and e-commerce were followed by searches for people, travel, places, computers and the Internet, health, education, and then entertainment. According to Spinks, the mid-90s pulsed with a 17 percent figure for sex-related searches, but that has shrunk to an unsexy 3.8 percent.
Spinks attributed this shrinkage to a number of factors:
“It could be the favourites are bookmarked or an overwhelming increase in people looking for information,” Prof Spinks said.
“More women are searching the web. Back in the 90s, it was probably young male geeks, but now the demographics are changing with mums and dads, kids, grandmas and business people all searching the web.
“The general population is searching now compared to the male set in the 90s.”
It also helps that there is more business information on the Internet now, as companies of all sizes have established themselves online after much groping and feeling for a good position. That has made it easier for virtually anyone to find what they are looking for when it comes to the information they desperately need.
—
Add to 
Bookmark Murdok: 
David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business.
