Click: What Millions of People Are Doing Online and Why it Matters (Hardcover)

by Bill Tancer (Author)
Key Phrases: prom hairstyles, false hope syndrome, top search terms, Early Adopter, New Year, United States (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Do Americans really spend that much time surfing porn sites? Which demographic visited Anna Nicole Smith's Web site most frequently? Who reads Perez Hilton? More than mere trivia nuggets, the answers to these questions define online behaviors among a varied mix of Internet users. Tancer, who leads global research at Hitwise, an online market research company, guides the reader through the search patterns among 10 million Internet users, challenging myths and making new discoveries about the psychology of consumers, illustrating that clicks speak louder than words and can reveal unspoken truths about individual drives that are not expressed via other forms of media. Everyone from marketing managers who want to know how much power social networking sites wield in the online market to political pollsters trying to decipher the disconnect between exit polls and election results would be advised to heed his research. Witty and invaluable in its insights, this book is destined to become a primer for online marketers and usability experts while shedding new light on the mindset and curiosities of the average Web surfer, i.e., your friends and neighbors. (Sept.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
Tancer, a search-engine data miner, takes a look at our culture by evaluating the millions of search queries on the Internet. He crunches the numbers to quantify our desires, our fears, our quest for knowledge, and our aspirations. From porn to prom dresses to politics, the content of our search queries reveals much about our private thoughts that we would not reveal to loved ones, friends, or a stranger taking a survey. His lists include the top “fear of” searches; fear of intimacy and fear of rejection were ranked high, while the fear of public speaking, usually sited as number one, came in at number nine. “How to tie a tie” just beat out “how to have sex” in the how-to category, with “how to levitate” clocking in at number six! For businesses, searches can reveal surprising information that dispels assumptions about customer behavior, such as the seasonality of clothing purchases. Tancer brings humor, clarity, and insight to the trends that are revealed by the ways we seek out and consume information on the Internet. --David Siegfried

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 240 pages
• Publisher: Hyperion (September 2, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1401323049
• ISBN-13: 978-1401323042
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars See all reviews (61 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #201,698 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars My Friend, My Confidant, My Secret Lover: Online Search, August 31, 2008

By	Robert L. Stinnett (Boonville, MO) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

(What's this?)

When I first received this book I was expecting it to be a business book that talked about general search related strategies and how to utilize search to make your business better. What I got, in "Click", was a book that took me into the revealing world of online research and opened up my eyes to concepts, trends and behaviors that I never knew existed. It was a wild ride; an interesting ride; and most of all one that left me wanting to know more about online search and what secrets the data holds.

All of us tell little white lies. We all holds back the full truth more often than we will admit. Our partners, our family, our friends -- they only get a portion of the whole picture. Yet to a perfect stranger we are willing to tell the whole story. We leave nothing out; we spill our emotions, our fears and our curiosity to it without a second thought. That stranger in the night? None other than your search engine of choice. It knows more about us and what we do than our closest friend or trusted life partner.

The data reveals more about our habits and beliefs than many of us want to even admit to ourselves. We tell search engines more about out hates, our fetishes, our hungers and our pains than you could possibly imagine. When our collective searches are pulled together and analyzed, they reveal fascinating habits and trends amongst different parts of the population. Things that no survey could come close to telling us.

This book is not only suited for business people who want to understand how to analyze click and search data, but also for those of us out there who want to understand and know more about the sociology of the web itself. If you are anything like me, you will finish reading this book with a lot more questions running through your mind than before you started. If nothing else, it will help you see the Internet -- and people -- in ways you never have before.

32 of 39 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Not sure if this is an informercia or a micro-biography on the author's life in search?, September 1, 2008

By	L. C Glover "Varied Interests" (Half Moon Bay Ca, USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

(What's this?)

Summary:
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The book is written in an acedotal style that is distracting from the message of the book; it is similar to listening to a person with ADD or a person jumping around the web on semi-related web links. The underlying message that real-time consumer/web user data is very powerful when you have access to it and know what you are doing is hidden below the self-grandizing of the author.

The author makes references to searches / research that only someone who has access to the search data of his firm (name left out intentionally) through out the book. It is annoying as no one but a client of his firm could really attempt what he describes in the book. Note: You will not get great insights into what can be done. He only hints at it as the searches being described would be fairly obvious to someone familiar with the data being gathered by the author's firm or other firms specializing in web traffic information gather. It seems that he is looking for potential consulting gigs with other businesses.

Purpose:
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The book is clearly an informercial for the client's firm. There are not great insights to be had by reading the book. The chapter on why prom dress searches spiking in January could easily be answered by asking a teenage where magazine ads for the Prom start to come out -- a pretty obvious logical why to find out. If the author has described his methods from the ground up including what data was available, the book would be much more useful for someone new to web marketing and what data is being gathered by web information companies.

Prose:
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The prose is not terribly well written. The author uses a circular style of writing that takes a while to get to the "wheat" amongst his self-grandizing "chaff". He should use a more straight-forward communication style. The book is a fast read, so you can get through it quickly if you are interested in the book.

Content:
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The content of the book can be boiled down to the following:
1) near real-time web usage statistics are available
2) the web usage statistics include where a brower came from, what was searched on, and where the browser was redirected to from a given page
3) you can use simple statistics in combination with other searches to find patterns
4) The number of patterns in near infinite and you need an organized/intelligent heuristic to quickly locate non-surface patterns.

Some of the examples are interesting but only toy examples nothing that is earth shattering or overly useful from a marketing perspective.

Summary:
Overall: 2.5 to 3 stars
Purpose: 3 stars -- get more clients for the author's firm
Prose: 2 stars
Content: 2 stars to 2.5 stars

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars great stuff, but not for everyone, November 10, 2008

By	C. P. Anderson (Charlotte, NC) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This is a great book. First, however, a few words about what it is - and what it's not. It's not a primer on how to get more customers to the website for your your small business. It's not a technical tome on search optimization. It's not the be-all and end-all on the psychology of online behavior.

What it is is something in the same vein as Blink, or Nudge, or Freakonomics. In other words, the author looks at some data and, in a lighthearted way, makes some interesting connections that tell us some very interesting things about ourselves.

In this case, the data is what criteria people enter into search engines. The idea is that this information helps reveal a true picture of ourselves. Ask yourself, what would you trust more when it comes to surveying people's attitudes on pornography - a telephone (or in-person!) survey or detailed data about what people type into a search engine late at night in the privacy of their own homes?

The fun thing about this book is how much data the author has at his fingertips and how much fun he has in seeing odd patterns develop over time or in finding odd correlations - and then trying to figure out why.

Take, for example, prom dresses ... There is an expected bump in searches right before prom time - but also one at the beginning of the year. Why? Well, it turns out that there are basically two different customer groups. One is the girl - social, fashion forward, probably a little more traditional, richer - who is really into it. She reads the fashion magazines that feature prom wear (and that come out in January) and then starts preparing. The other is the girl who knows she's expected to go, and she's got to wear something, and doesn't want (or have) a lot of money to spend on it ("cheap prom dresses" soar during the later time period). The author even gets into what he calls "search arbitrage" - i.e., predicting things (like who's going to win American Idol or predicting the next hot band) based on search results.

Now, this sort of thing is not for everyone. The author meanders around quite widely, and the average reader may be asking themselves "so what?" quite a but. But for those of who have a bent toward data, it's a very fun ride.

The only beefs I had were that the author relegated his methodology to a few short paragraphs in the introduction. It's important, interesting in its own regard, and definitely could have had some more emphasis.

Also, the author's writing style is good, but he's no Malcom Gladwell . In particular, he has an annoying habit of starting each chapter with a hard-to-follow, not totally relevant personal story before he gets to the data. I strongly disagree with the reviewers who thought the writing was really bad or too self-serving. The personal stories simply make it more readable. And he's really quite humble. If you'd like an example of what NOT to do in this regard, try Buyology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy.