Recent quotes:
The search engine manipulation effect (SEME) and its possible impact on the outcomes of elections | PNAS
Specifically, we show that (i) biased search rankings can shift the voting preferences of undecided voters by 20% or more, (ii) the shift can be much higher in some demographic groups, and (iii) such rankings can be masked so that people show no awareness of the manipulation.Internet search patterns reveal clinical course of COVID-19 disease progression and pandemic spread across 32 countries | npj Digital Medicine
Temporal correlation analyses were conducted to characterize the relationships between a range of COVID-19 symptom-specific search terms and reported COVID-19 cases and deaths for each country from January 1 through April 20, 2020. Increases in COVID-19 symptom-related searches preceded increases in reported COVID-19 cases and deaths by an average of 18.53 days (95% CI 15.98–21.08) and 22.16 days (20.33–23.99), respectively.
My contention is that Pinterest is one of the four ways that people find things on the Internet. The default, of course, is Googling (or—fine, Microsoft—Binging). For real-time searches, there is Twitter. For people or entities, there's Facebook. But if what you want to find are things, objects, then Pinterest is the way to go.
And they are just getting started. They've got 30 billion pins now, half of them in the last six months. They've got 750 million boards. A full 75 percent of their traffic comes from mobile devices, and according to researchers, they're the top traffic source to retailers' websites and an important secondary source after Facebook for some media sites, like Buzzfeed.