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Searching For The Truth About Top Searches

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by Jeff Bercovici
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Dec 21 2007 12:00am EDT

Searching for the Truth about Top Searches

There's a great story by Carl Bialik in today's Wall Street Journal about all the bogus that goes into those year-end lists of the top web searches. For one thing, they're not actually year-end lists: In the interest of putting them out before everyone has checked out for the holidays, they're generally compiled in early December. Any searches involving porn or rival search engines are usually left out as well.

But my favorite tidbit comes from AOL, which counted all 2007 searches for "Harry Potter" as searches for the Time Warner-produced film Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. I wonder how Scholastic, which published Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows this year, feels about that. □

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