The Google Generation Myth

Many people believe that the Google Generation, teenagers now, are an especially adept group, making skillful use of search engines and outperforming their older peers as a result.

It’s not true.

And not only that, if you look at the heaviest users of the web, it’s not kids in their late teens – it’s the elderly.  A fascinating report has been written, commissioned by JISC and the British Library which blows apart many myths about how different generations search for information using search engines.

Read their pdf – it’s terrific stuff…

Some Interesting Stats on WordPress and WordPress.com

I was doing a little thinking about WordPress and its rival CMS systems. And then I thought… it’s not hard to find comparisons if you know where to look. Sadly it’s hard to find hard numbers – people hold this data dearly.

Still – I had a play with Alexa and Google and the stats were interesting to see. WordPress.com has practically exploded. If Alexa’s 2% reach is correct then that makes WordPress.com and all its blogs into one of the most potent internet nodes.

Looking for traffic to WordPress.org and its rivals (I’ve put in Joomla, Plone and Drupal) is also illuminating. I recommend a good play around with the charts. Also look at different regions if you’re working with Google.

Google’s CMS traffic

Alexa’s CMS traffic

I find these stats sites great fun. You can also see the effects of certain events. For example, searches for the word Botfly shot up and into existance last year – and these correlated with spikes in traffic to my story of my own experience of the little blighters. The reason was a TV show.

You can also get a taste for the desires of certain countries… French Kissing, it seems, generates huge interest in Pakistan. They also like English Girls.

Google Ranking Effect on Traffic

We spend a lot of time persuading people of the importance of Google and other search engines on the popularity of a page to the world. For this page on a personal blog plenty of hits were coming in, yet suddenly there was an increase in traffic for this page which persisted.

Why? Because for a year, the page came at the top of the second page of Google searches for the term ‘botfly’ and then suddenly it got promoted to second from bottom of the first page. Look at the difference in clicks for that search term from Google:

The difference is worth about a 30% increase in traffic, in this case.