Web2.0rhea eclipses search in UK Internet users in the UK are now officially more interested in talking about themselves than they are in learning about their world. The proof? According to Hitwise, during the month of May more UK web users visited social networking sites than they did search engines — a first. Hitwise UK social networking v. search engine …
YouTube should be in some other category such as Videos. Just because it has a comments section doesn't make it a Social Network site! All the comments are about the video, nothing about socially networking. If their definition of a Social Network site is that it has a comments section I certainly hope The Reg is also in that section making up the numbers, along with practically every other site on the internet.
So when you take YouTube completely out of the equation, and although Social Networking is big - it undoubtedly is - it probably still isn't as big as Search using this particular metric. Since of course you could also do this comparison using the number of pages seen, time spent on each site or even just the number of unique people who visit them. Which one actually defines who is biggest I don't know, since they all show different types of usage.
"The reason we classify [YouTube] in our Social Networks and Forums category is because it has a lot of social capabilities"
Social? most comments are fairly anti-social and come from the minds of 13 yr old boys or older men with minds of 13 yr olds.
Are we seeing a trend where punters don't like the answers from search engines and prefer to rely on the scare stories and 'a friend of mine's uncle's doctor was speaking to a barman who reckoned . . ' .
sort of "It's too hard reading newspapers so I buy the Sun"
...do not teach you about the world, they merely lead you to the opinions of others about the world. Those opinions are often not based on fact*, prejudiced or pushing some personal agenda.
The only way to truly learn about the world is to get out from behind the screen and go see it.
*No, Wikipedia does not count as a reliable source
From many exchanges I've seen on social networking sites, there is a huge amount of traffic initiated by people too lazy (or stupid) to use search engines effectively (if at all).
In fact, just the kind of people you'd expect to find on Facebook, et al.
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