September, 1998
November, 1998
December, 1998 (really!) Project

My next project will involve random chat on icq. My plan is to experiment with different words in the title field of my chat settings, to see how that affects the number of messages/chat requests I receive. I will conduct this research over the course of several weekday nights, for an hour each night at the same time. I haven't entirely decided which terms I'm going to use yet, but one of them will definitely be "sex". For those who think there is something wrong with doing this, I say, after long and careful consideration of this possibility -- "oh well." I have fun talking to people on icq.

July 3rd, 1998 Project

Question to be investigated:

Which is the best search engine?

Method of Inquiry:

Compare the number of hits on the search terms "love" "hate" and "chocolate" for six different search engines, Netscape, Webcrawler, Alta Vista, Hot Bot, Infoseek, and Look Smart.

Statistics:

Search Engine	Hits on the Search Term
	"love"	"hate"	"chocolate"
Netscape	1,257,163	209,781	105,388
Webcrawler	103,755	14,163	7,451
Alta Vista	9,716,270	818,420	768,320
Hot Bot	3,027,189	517,243	244,439
Infoseek	4,483,547	610,363	267,908
Look Smart	365	26	142

Scientific conclusions:

• Love is overwhelmingly more popular than chocolate.
• Sadly, so is hate.
• Although it had the lowest overall number of hits, we must recommend the Look Smart search engine, as it had the best chocolate : hate ratio.

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* Coming Soon... a comparison of hits for god, the devil, and devil's food cake. *

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Ideas for upcoming studies include:

• Who is it most fashionable to hate? An in-depth study of the relative amount of animosity expressed on the net towards blacks, gays, jews, and feminists.

• How many people who sign up for a page on GeoCities actually make one? A penetrating longitudinal study of a sample of geopages to see what percentage ever put a real page up.

Just in case there is *any* doubt, these research projects are tongue in cheek and in no way do justice to the scientific method. Their sole purpose is to entertain.




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