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Chris Anderson - End of Theory: Hitwise's measurement of the Petabyte Age
July 31, 2008
It's always pretty cool when you read a piece of writing that recognises a paradigm shift - Chris Anderson's End of Theory piece in Wired starts out by saying that, "Our ability to capture, warehouse, and understand massive amounts of data is changing science, medicine, business, and technology."
Anderson's point that models have become obsolete in an era of 'data deluge' has annoyed more than a few scientists. Leaving models aside for the moment, I'll pick up on a couple of his arguments that are relevant to identifying trends in the marketing industry. Firstly that we're, "sifting through the most measured age in history" and secondly that we have our fingertips on, "dimensionally agnostic statistics".
As a researcher at Hitwise, I'll sometimes use a question or theory to guide me through our dataset (the online behaviour of 25 million users worldwide, on more than 1 million websites). Maybe I'll ask what's the consumer demand leading up to a product launch for retail, or how constituents are thinking about key environmental issues for government.
However, it's quite often the case that I'll let the data 'speak' first, then use context to form a theory and marketing application. Here's an example:
Our Hitwise Fast Moving Search Term report is purely based on terms that had the largest relative or volume increase in a given time period. Here's the top 10 search terms driving traffic to Education – Reference websites, week ending 19 July 2008:
There's a few interesting stories contained in those search terms that based on my contextual knowledge, I can pretty much 'get' immediately; such as 'radovan kardazic' and his recent capture, or 'china' and the impending Olympic games. Some of the terms make sense from a 'brand' point of view – 'bom' refers to the Bureau of Meteorology which is a popular online service for weather information. Other terms I'm not familiar with such as 'estelle getty' I can plug into a search engine to find out from news reports that the famous comedian recently died. I can then use our Hitwise Search Analysis report to find out the websites that actually received traffic on the term to confirm the reason behind the sudden increase in searches.
I would start to get the impression that many of the fast moving search terms sending traffic to Education – Reference websites are related to recent news items, and have therefore found an 'industry relationship'. For website owners in the Education – Reference space, I'd then recommend using SEO and PPC best practice on news items in their content strategies to boost traffic referrals.
"All models are wrong, but some are useful"
You could argue the fact that the data has been summarised into a programming format or that it's been put into an industry context, i.e. 'Education – Reference' that we've already created a model for our dataset. However, Anderson's made a valuable point that the availability of huge datasets to businesses and consumers is creating change in some important industries.
Posted by Sandra Hanchard at 09:45 AM
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