Men talk to Google not girlfriends: Study reveals many men need to get out more

A typical male search query uses just two words, compared with three for women. Women are also more patient about investigating different potential routes.

While women are happy to look through six or seven results returned by a search query, men typically only refer to two or three before becoming impatient and refining their search or moving on to a new search altogether.

As a result men devote an average of just three minutes to each of the 42 searches they conduct each week, compared to the five minutes women spend on 30 searches a week. —Robert Jaques —Men talk to Google not girlfriends: Study reveals many men need to get out more (vnunet)

Hmm… so, according to the statistic I quoted above, women spend about 150 minutes searching the web each week, while men spend only 126 minutes searching the web. So… women spend more time searching Google than men do. That fact runs against the cutesy angle this puff piece adopts.

In case you hand’t noticed, the headline is misleading. In addition, this “research” was conducted via a poll, which means it is not very reliable: people are not very good at estimating their own behavior.

The design of the vnunet site looks professional, but the content of this article is less than sterling. I’m blogging this for use in a future class unit on information literacy.