BANGALORE: An alarming number of Net surfers the world over are not efficient in reaching their online destinations. Instead of entering the URL into the address field of their Web browsers, millions of Internet users enter the name of the site they want into the search box of their homepage or other search engines. This startling revelation was made Web intelligence and traffic measurement agency Alexa Research following a study that lasted for two years.

According to a release, the study also found that the most popular term people search for online is ‘sex’. The most popular celebrities searched for were Britney Spears, Pamela Anderson, Backstreet Boys, Jennifer Lopez and Eminem. Pokemon was the most popular specific toy or game searched. Playboy was the most popular media property.

These findings are based on an examination of more than 42 million search pages viewed in aggregate by users of the Alexa toolbar at ten of the Internet’s leading portals and search engines—altavista.com, aol.com, excite.com, go.com, google.com, goto.com, lycos.com, msn.com, netscape.com, and yahoo.com —between March 1999 and January 2001.

"Based on the results of this study, we believe that the Web is still a technical hurdle many people have not yet cleared," said Matthew Work, Vice President of Alexa Research. "The prevalence of sex-related search terms probably isn’t a shock to most people, but we were surprised by the number of people that accessed Web sites by entering site names as search terms rather than just typing them in the address field of their browser."

Four of the top ten search terms sought by users in the study were Web site names or addresses. Hotmail—whether entered as "hotmail," "hotmail.com" or "www.hotmail.com"—was the second most popular term sought. Yahoo (including "yahoo.com" and "www.yahoo.com") was third. eBay and AOL were 9th and 10th, respectively. Also among the top 50 were Excite, AltaVista, Amazon and MSN.

"This study shows that for many, there’s a conceptual misunderstanding of how to effectively navigate the Web," said Work. "Some people think that their homepage is the Web, that they have to go through their homepage in order to get to the site they want, without realizing that any Web site can be accessed directly. This notion is supported by our Web traffic popularity rankings, where eight of the top 10 sites are portals and/or search engines."

Sex-related terms were quite popular. Of all the terms searched for online, 0.3289 per cent—or roughly 1 of every 300 terms—were ‘sex’. According to their online searching habits, people want ‘sex’ more than they want ‘games’, ‘music’, ‘travel’, ‘jokes’, ‘cars’, ‘jobs’, ‘weather’ and ‘health‘ combined. ‘Porn’ (along with ‘porno’ and ‘pornography’) was the fourth most popular search term.

‘Chat’ (and ‘chatrooms’), ‘mp3’, ‘horoscope’ (and ‘horoscopes’) and ‘games’ round out the Top 10. ‘Map’ (and ‘maps’), ‘pokemon’, ‘music’, ‘travel’, ‘screensaver’ (and ‘screensavers’) and ‘free’ round out the Top 20.

One of the more notable findings from the study is how diffused the list of search terms is, compared to how concentrated the Web is overall. "The top 50 search terms account for only 2.73 per cent of all search term page views, which reflects how diverse people’s interests are," said Lead Data Miner Jason Maxham. "By contrast, the 50 most popular Web sites receive 25 per cent of all traffic—that’s more than eight times as concentrated as the search terms. This concentration reveals that in the bigger picture, people still converge on the same batch of sites," he added.