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Opinion
Prescient Postings
7/12/2007
searchonomics" comes in.There are growing numbers of folks who are getting adept at intuiting where certain kinds of human behaviors are going to increase or decrease by looking at the search patterns and terms of searchers in general. For example, your own student enrollment management folks probably track potential students' interest, as an aggregate and maybe by geographic region, based on visits to various Web pages. But that gives them only the ability to compare your own campus' statistics with similar statistics from the past. They can use that to predict applications, which is useful.
Maybe they would find it useful to have data about the frequency of searches in the various engines of your institution's name, and the names of your competitor institutions? That's the kind of thing searchonomics researchers do.
Ooh, here's my prediction: Although there isn't one now, I predict that there will be a Wikipedia article on searchonomics before the end of July; and I promise not to do it myself. I think I just made a very crude searchonomic-like prediction.
While waiting for that article to mysteriously appear, remember that if it appears to be prescient, it's probably either searchonomics or a coincidence!
About the author: Terry Calhoun is Director of Communications and Publications for the Society
for College and University Planning (SCUP). You can contact him through CT's IT Trends forum by clicking here. View more articles by Terry Calhoun.
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