“Click” - Anecdotal but good

I recently finished Bill Tancer’s new book - “Click: What Millions of People Are Doing Online and Why It Matters”. It’s a real look into Bill’s day-to-day job which gives him almost instant access to the American zeitgeist.

As General Manager, Global Research at Hitwise, a search intelligence company, Bill has truly unprecedented access to insights on millions of internet users and what they search.

Bill’s incredible curiosity and the Hitwise platform enable him to see trends no one ever knew existed and in some cases Bill attempts to use search to correlate data and predict outcomes to rather obscure events, Like who will win Dancing With the Stars winner - he was wrong - unfortunately figuring out how search results correlate to predictable results in the real world still seems hard to reconcile.

You can read Bill’s blog for his continued short curiosity samplings he occasionally does, pulling data from the network.

Here’s another Hitwise blog entry looking at the recent online retailer traffic. Their ability to track sites and searches allows them insight into the economic indicators - spoiler: Traffic to the category has been down each week as compared to last year for the past six weeks.

While we are on the subject I think the Hitwise widget is a pretty interesting utility - you can download it here. Hitwise To Go - highlights weekly online user behavior stats including the top-performing websites and most searched-for products and brands. And Hitwise Intelligence gives updates and insights into Internet users’ online behavior.

What I am really wondering is how long until someone comes along and makes this kind of user data a $9.99 a month software-as-service web app - that would be something!