Gore's Internet Problem
Al
Gore has an Internet problem. No, it's not that silly remark about him having
invented it. Gore's real problem is that Net surfers apparently think his site
is too dull to visit.
A
recent study by Direct Hit, the Massachusetts-based company that operates a
"popularity" search engine, revealed that for five days in late October, almost
no one searching the Web for information about Gore actually made their way to
Gore's official Web site. By a large margin, Web surfers preferred going to a
Gore parody site or an anti-Gore site to the real thing.
Direct
Hit tracked the paths of about 1,400 Web surfers who entered the names Al Gore
or Bill Bradley into search engines from Oct. 22 to Oct. 27. These were the
days leading up to the "town hall" meeting between Gore and Bradley in New
Hampshire. Direct Hit has partnerships with a large number of Web companies,
including Microsoft Network, Lycos, InfoSpace, LookSmart, and others. The
company claims that it tracks some 71 percent of all Web users over the course
of a month.
The
good news for Gore is that more Web surfers were looking for his name than
Bradley's, by a factor of 57 percent (793 surfers) to 43 percent (597).
The
bad news is that when the search results came up, there was no indication that
anyone during those five days used the results to visit Gore's authorized site .
The
official site "didn't even make the top 50" choices of those who searched for
Gore's name, according to a Direct Hit executive. Instead, Web surfers
presented with a variety of options were more likely to visit a joke or parody
site. Gore's site in Spanish was among the 30 sites most often visited by those
searching for his name, but Direct Hit executives say that after the top 10,
there's no significant traffic worth measuring.
By
contrast, Bradley's official site was the most common destination of those who
entered Bradley's name into a search engine, according to Direct Hit. The
Bradley campaign declined to comment on the study.
Roger
Salazar, a spokesman for the Gore campaign, says that he has not seen the
Direct Hit study. "It doesn't really surprise me," Salazar says. "The vice
president is much better known than his opponent, and so it makes sense that
more people would be looking for first-time information that way." Salazar says
his campaign is focused on making Gore's site "as comprehensive and informative
as it can be" and estimates that the site attracts several thousand unique
visitors per week.
Direct
Hit says that while it cannot detect the identity of individual Web users, it
can track their movements with unprecedented precision. "We process the data
from our partners on a daily basis," says Gary Culliss, Direct Hit's chairman
and co-founder. The process is similar to that used to track banner advertising
on the Web. Culliss added that the popularity rankings also take into
consideration the amount of time that visitors spend on a given site.
Some
of the Gore-related sites that Direct Hit said were visited most by those
searching for Gore material are out of date and thinly visited. The
third-most-visited Gore site, according to Direct Hit, is an Al Gore joke
repository, posted on the home page of a GeoCities member and sponsored by the
Ripon College Republicans. The site is actually no longer at the address that
Direct Hit found to be most visited (a common problem with search engines). Now
on a Tripod home page, the site itself claims to have been hit only 1,110 times
since December 1998. (Nothing currently on the site is going to hurt Gore very
much. Sample joke: "Topping the list of top 20 shortest books of the
century-- Al Gore: The Wild Years .")
Of
course, the Direct Hit study doesn't mean that no one is going to the Gore
site. Loyal visitors probably already know the URL or have it bookmarked in
their Web browsers. And it's possible (though statistically unlikely) that
large numbers of Web surfers using search engines not measured by Direct Hit
were flocking to the Gore site. Most important, with the first primaries still
months away, the Gore campaign hasn't advertised much to bring newcomers to the
site.
It's also possible that
the problem is not Gore's alone, but rather is common to front-runners.
Although Direct Hit has yet to produce a similar traffic study for the
Republican candidates, a search on its Web site shows that George W. Bush's
official site
is also not among the top 10 sites surfed by those entering Bush's name.
However, upstart John McCain's official site , like Bradley's, is the most popular
destination for those who've entered his name into a search engine.
