Someone's been watching you on the Web

Dogpile sampled Internet searches in the Twin Cities last week and found some specific interests: dogs, mirrors and Paris Hilton.

Steve Alexander, Star Tribune

What's on your mind?

Newspapers, survey takers, advertisers and your next-door neighbor are always curious, but they usually don't know unless you tell them. But Americans have the new habit of telling Internet search engines what they're thinking about; they do it every time they type a query into Google.

What if somebody compiled all those queries into a portrait of our collective personal thoughts? Somebody has. In a sort of mini-profile of what Twin Cities Internet users were thinking Monday, Wednesday and Friday last week, the Bellevue, Wash.-based search engine Dogpile put together a list of the "key word" search terms used in its top 20 searches by people in the Twin Cities.

The results? Apparently we have a more-than-usual interest in dogs, baby names and hockey apparel.

Dogpile is a "search engine aggregator" that accepts your key words, then runs searches on them on major search engines such as Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask Jeeves. Dogpile then gives the user a composite short list of what it considers the best search results.

The three daily lists include Dogpile searches in the metro's four area codes (612, 651, 763 and 952.) Because this is a family newspaper, Dogpile agreed to filter out searches for X-rated terms. (You know what they are, anyway.)

Many of the local top 20 searches fell into a few popular categories, such as music lyrics and heiress Paris Hilton. But less-frequent searches not in the top 20 were for topics such as "mirrors,"New England colonies,"Minnesota Wild apparel" and "What is ESP?"

Sometimes the top lists corresponded to the news of the day or the calendar; Hurricane Wilma and Halloween both appear in these lists.

The Twin Cities search results were a lot like those Dogpile sees nationally. However, key word searches for dogs, radio stations and baby names showed up more often here than in the country as a whole, the company said.

There also are a few odd searches, such as for eBay or complicated Internet addresses within Google's website. Dogpile says that happens when users aren't technically savvy or when they make a common mistake.

The error comes when they think they are typing in the Internet address box at the top of the Web browser, they really are typing in the Dogpile key word search window.

In addition, some complex Internet addresses actually have shorter names that people type in to get there.

The IP address

Such localized search information is not widely available.

But it's feasible for any search engine company to use "data mining" techniques to compare the Internet searches being made in one geographic area vs. another, said Jon Nolz, marketing director at InfoSpace Inc., the Bellevue, Wash., company that owns the nine-year-old Dogpile service.

To compile the Twin Cities search lists, InfoSpace sorted millions of computerized records of Dogpile Internet searches based on where they originated.

The point of origin -- an area code, ZIP code, city, state or country -- can be determined by the "IP address" of the computer that made the Internet search, Nolz said. Because every computer on the Internet has an IP (Internet protocol) address assigned to it by an Internet service provider, it's possible to trace an IP address back to the geographic location of the service provider.

While marketers and advertisers might be interested in buying such demographic information, InfoSpace hasn't tried to sell it -- at least not so far, Nolz said.

But even if the company does sell that data, it won't invade anyone's personal privacy by identifying their individual Internet searches, he said.

"We don't look at individual customers, and we are not playing a Big Brother role," Nolz said.

"We're only looking at aggregate totals of IP addresses."