Sorting through about 36 million searches generated by more than 650,000 AOL users, Gomes came to one definitive conclusion: Deals dominate the Internet.
“One thing about us Internet users: We like our music, we like our pictures, we like our sex — and we like them all free,” Gomes said, adding that the word “free,” was the most popular search word, other than prepositions and conjunctions.
As for searches for sexual content, Gomes found the term “sex” ranked high on the list alongside such popular words as “music,” “map” and “pictures.”
“The web turns out to be every bit the domain of the unbounded id we always thought it was,” Gomes said. “According to a research paper about the data prepared by an AOL-led team, porn was the third most common activity of web searchers, behind entertainment and shopping. My study showed that 14 percent of all users made some form of explicit sexual search. And sex was No. 44 on the list of greatest hits words; usually, it's around 2,500 for standard usage, such as in English-language novels.”
According to Gomes, the most popular person searched for in the data was Peter Wentz, the singer for pop group Fall Out Boy. Pamela Anderson was second, followed by Paris Hilton.
While the Wall Street Journal has made its own study, others have mined the data using more sophisticated techniques. As XBIZ reported earlier, IT firm Splunk has released its seven Internet user profiles based on the AOL data.