• Reuters, Wednesday, September 17, 2008 11:30 AM

In his new book, "Click: What Millions of People are Doing Online and Why it Matters," Hitwise General Manager of Global Research Bill Tancer reveals that social networking sites are the Internet's biggest attraction, surpassing pornography and underscoring a seismic shift in the way people communicate. "There are some patterns to our Internet use that we tend to repeat very specifically and predictably, from diet searches, to prom dresses, to what we do around the holidays," Tancer told Reuters. He conducted his research by analyzing consumers' searching habits

One of the biggest shifts in Web use he found over the past decade has been the fall of interest in pornography or adult entertainment sites. Searching for porn has dropped to about 10% of searches from 20% a decade ago. "As social networking traffic has increased, visits to porn sites have decreased," Tancer said, adding that 18- to 24-year-olds were searching less for porn. "My theory is that young users spend so much time on social networks that they don't have time to look at adult sites."

Tancer added that celebrity searches remain enormously popular, as do searches for political figures. However, he notes that most searches for the presidential candidates in particular were not about issues. "A lot of the focus around the candidates in general is image based. People want to know how tall Barack Obama is and also to search for their families," Tancer said. "You have to get far down in the search terms to link the search for a candidate with any issue."

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