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Hitwise Intelligence - Robin Goad - UK
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Large Hadron Collider fever online!
September 10, 2008
I’m writing this at 10:30am, so it seems like Earth probably hasn’t been sucked into a black hole (at least not yet). The ‘big bang’ experiment, which aims to recreate in miniature the creation of the Universe, has successfully started in Switzerland, generating a huge amount of excitement amongst both physicists and normal people.
We are currently tracking two websites operated by CERN, The European Organization for Nuclear Research. The first, public.web.cern.ch, is the organization’s public homepage, while the second, lhc.web.cern.ch, contains more detailed information about the Large Hadron Collider, the vast circular ring under Geneva in which the experiment is being conducted. As you can see from the chart below, traffic to both sites has increased significantly over the last few days. Yesterday (September 9th), the CERN homepage ranked 13th within our Education – Reference category and 480th overall.
Looking at the demographic information for the CERN homepage, during the 4 weeks ending September 6th 57.6% of visitors were male and were most likely to be 45-54 year-olds based in the West Midlands (a lot of physics lecturers from Warwick University, perhaps?).
Looking at the more in depth MOSAIC profiles for the site, the two most over represented type were Town Gown Transition (“Students and academics mix with young professionals in terraces relatively close to universities”) and, more surprisingly, Cared for Pensioners (“Old people in specially constructed accommodation mostly managed by local authorities, many with a resident warden”). Then again, perhaps it’s not that surprising: presumably the origins of the universe and the existence (or not) of God are particularly relevant to the residents of old people’s homes.
Next week we’ll look into how the search data surrounding this story pans out, so keep an eye on the blog and our Twitter feed for updates.
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Posted by Robin Goad at 11:30 AM
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In Categories Demographics | Education | Mosaic lifestyle | Science
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