Review: Click

“I love data,” says Bill Tancer, author of Click: What We Do Online and Why It Matters. And by the end of his book, while you may not love data like he does, you will certainly have a healthy respect for what our internet use can reveal about us.

Tancer, who works for an American company called Hitwise, has access to the search queries made by samples of more than 10 million internet users at a time. He believes that “we are what we click”, and that through analysis of our online searches a range of revelations can be made about what weighs on our minds. The internet, he writes, is changing the way we experience the world, and his book contains some fascinating insights to support this claim.

These range from the terrifying (during the recent American presidential campaign, the greatest spike in searches was for Sarah Palin — seeking not voting record or policy statements, but ‘hot pictures’) to the slightly sad (we are more likely to reveal our high level of social fear through our online queries than in surveys).

Society is changing, and traditional research polling is no longer as accurate as it was. Tancer points to the decline in numbers of people in America with a home landline, the increase in ‘do-not-call’ lists and how that is going to impact on traditional phone-based research. Plus, social desirability factors always confound direct research — how many people are comfortable answering questions about their use of online adult sites? It is this gap that search analysis can fill.

The web is changing from a static medium to a place where consumers can place their own content, where traditional markers of success such as the hotel star-rating system can take second place to anonymous comments on sites such as Travelwise.

Businesses and market researchers are desperate to learn how to ride this wave rather than have to paddle furiously just to keep up, often getting it wrong in the process, as a long chapter on searches for prom dresses attests. Tancer admits to having a bit of an obsession about prom-dress searches … so prepare to learn more on the subject than you may well have ever wished to.

So while there are economic implications (consider that the British band Arctic Monkeys went straight to Number 1 in the UK with their first single, without the backing of any major recoding label, due to the power of social networking sites) and undoubtedly social effects (as one interviewee states, whereas her parents had to wait weeks between letters when dating, she knows straight away when her boyfriend sits down at his computer), etc, Tancer is not able to offer many insights as to what all this is going to mean.

Click demonstrates just what an incredible amount of information exists in cyberspace, and does a good job of providing a snapshot of the kinds of things we can learn from it, but this isn’t the book to provide a deeper evaluation of where this is all heading. Still, Tancer has written a fairly accessible book about a world of which most of us scratch only the surface, but a world we all nonetheless help create.

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