• by David Berkowitz , December 5, 2006

It's no secret that you can use research to support any case you're trying to make, but when the data's released by a search engine, it highlights some of the challenges in understanding search research.

The first rule of reading any sort of research is that if something sounds offbase, it's worth questioning. Maybe you'll discover that it's truly counterintuitive research, and hence worth the extra time digesting it. Maybe you'll realize you just didn't understand it, and once diving deeper, it makes sense. Or, maybe the story you're being told doesn't hold water.

One announcement that required further investigating came from Lycos, which reported last week that "its Angelfire site has once again claimed the top spot as the number one community teen destination for teens ages 13-17 and tweens ages 18-24, according to the most recent comScore Media Metrix report of Internet audience rankings for Oct. 2006."

I only have so much Web surfing time, especially for sites that cater to the 13- to 24-year-old set, so I'm thrown for a surprise every so often by certain sites' popularity. Yet how could Angelfire be bigger than MySpace for a certain age group? And, as a friend pointed out, how could it even be bigger than Geocities, which was once synonymous with personal homepages and was, in many ways, one of the first blogging platforms?

A review of other data sources suggested something was amiss. Using Google Trends, I plotted the search volume for MySpace, Geocities, Lycos, Tripod, and Angelfire; this isn't a perfect correlation for traffic, but it's an indicator. Since 2005, MySpace has dominated search volume, and the rest of the terms are a blur, with Lycos slightly ahead of the others. When I removed MySpace, Angelfire clearly ranked last. The same pattern emerged when looking at Compete's site rankings.

I asked Lycos about some of the discrepancies, and a representative wrote, "MySpace is categorized (as per comScore Media Metrix) as a social networking site, whereas Angelfire is a teen community destination." She later added, "ComScore considers Geocities (along with Tripod and Angelfire on Lycos) as a web publishing/web hosting site." ComScore was contacted about this story and had no comment on the near-final draft of this column sent to them more than 24 hours before submitting it for publication.

The discrepancies discovered in the Lycos release and comScore research typify a classic problem of search marketing. If there's a disconnect between the marketer's nomenclature and popular consumer usage, then the whole experience is futile. Marketers are from Mars; customers are from Venus. What's the difference between a teen community site and a social network? I never was able to find out, but I'd argue that "social network" has emerged as the more common vernacular.

The Angelfire story took even more interesting turns when reviewing Hitwise data. Some of the sites trailing Angelfire in the comScore teen community ranking include Quizilla (where members post quizzes, poems, and stories), Neopets (a virtual pet game), and Tagged (which calls itself a social networking destination, so how that differs from MySpace is beyond me). Reviewing Hitwise data from February through November, Neopets has always been the top-ranked site, Tagged and Angelfire have jockeyed for second place (Tagged dipped in September and October but rose in November), and Quizilla has consistently ranked last.

In another snapshot of the data, I was able to review a Hitwise grouping for "Web 1.0" sites--namely, Geocities, Angelfire, Tripod, and WebRing (listed in order of market share). Collectively, their market share of Web site visits plummeted from 0.33% in November 2004 to 0.14% two years later. Even if raw traffic numbers have increased for any of these sites, the category overall doesn't seem to be one of the high growth areas for the Web. There were other signs something's amiss with the claims in the Lycos release. It mentions that the five most popular topics with Angelfire members in 2006 include do it yourself/how-to tips (#2) and addiction recovery (#3). Maybe, somehow, Angelfire's teen users are big how-to junkies (how to illegally download music, how to find your nearest H&M, how to score a date with members of Congress). Even so, there's no way that addiction recovery makes it to third place for teens, topping sexuality and music and just two notches down from relationships. Then again, perhaps that included addiction to Wii and PS3.

Some day, I wouldn't be surprised to see Ask.com issue a release that it's the No. 1 search engine, since Google, Yahoo, MSN, and AOL are all portals. The trick is to use the numbers well enough that they support your case and boost your standing without drawing attention to themselves. If they draw too much attention, someone's going to come along, pull back the curtain, and see if there's a real wizard there.