I’ve recently been working on trying to map out people’s appetite for knowledge online and the BBC’s ‘voice’ within each topic with James Webb. In order to do this I grouped hundreds of websites into different categories and measured the volume of traffic going to each of those genres over the course of a year using Experian Hitwise. I then validated these figures by comparing the results with actual visitor numbers to the BBC websites.
As far as I’m aware this kind of work hasn’t been carried out before but I’d be grateful if anyone could point out similar studies and how this one compares? If you click on the image below it will give you a better view.
Data sourced from Experian Hitwise
Notes: This is a work in progress. At present, I think that the history category is underrepresented and the outer pie charts in section 1 aren’t to scale.
See all of the data visualisations here
See more on visualising search data
July 29th, 2011 → 2:01 pm
[...] Last weeks post looked at what people searched for in seven areas: Health, Food, Nature, Gardening, History, Religion and Science. [...]
September 28th, 2011 → 1:47 pm
[...] Our thirst for knowledge (searchinsights.wordpress.com) [...]