Erstellt am: 27. 1. 2015 - 10:22 Uhr
Today's Webtip: Searching for Sex
As much as I dislike the who data-mining, person tracking, privacy demeaning practices of big government and most corporations; there is a part of me that really gets excited at the thought of what could be learned by analyzing our collective behavior on the net. Unfortunately, most companies don't seem to be all that willing to let that info go, or refuse to look at the truly interesting things. Well, the things I find interesting anyway.
One of the companies that does (and has some pretty interesting data to build off of) was OKCupid. The site was originally developed to be something completely other than a dating site by some serious math geeks, and some of that would get through every now and again when they posted on their Trends blog.
That doesn't happen much anymore, which might be because they were purchased by a major online dating company, or because one of the heads is now heading that company, or because that data has since been turned in to a book. I don't know.
But I do know that big sex data is sort of sexy.
Which is why a site like the New York Times decided to get in on the game, I guess.
They don't have the extremely specific (or explicit) data that the OKCupid crew do, but they try to make the best of what Google has to offer. Well, the best of what Google has to offer the public.
The result is interesting. Not only for the results, but also for an illustration of the difficulties in doing good analysis of the data, and for having a sort of basic misunderstanding of how people google.