Those kinds of insights, says Tancer, are what have transformed him into a full-time data junkie.
"The trick is always finding the right adjustment for specific search terms, " admits Tancer.
Hitwise's data, as Tancer reveals in Click, hasn't always led him in the right direction.
Tancer also claims he can forecast bigger economic trends, as evidenced by Hitwise's growing hedge fund clientele.
When we find a satisfaction questionnaire tucked in with our bill, Tancer leaves it on the table.
No number of polled opinions, Tancer insists, will ever add up to a reliable indicator of what consumers want.
But Tancer argues that Hitwise's "big picture" view of Web activity--rather than tracking individuals--keeps the firm out of privacy troubles.
In 2002, Tancer, a former Navy prosecutor, was working for the search engine LookSmart when he discovered the recently-launched start-up Hitwise.
Even given all that traffic counting, Tancer says he can't use his outsized data collection to answer one major question: the outcome of November's election.
"It's not like following someone home on the highway, " Tancer says.
Pooled together and scrubbed of its identifying features like names and phone numbers, Tancer says the logs show more than just how people use the Internet.
Tancer points out that since 2005, for instance, searches for "prom dress" have spiked in January, long before retailers began their advertising push for prom apparel in March.
Tancer is even working with researchers at Stanford to explore a new consumer confidence estimate based on search terms like "gas prices" and visits to thrifty comparison-shopping sites, which have climbed in response to this year's economic pain.
Tancer is the curator of 10 million users' Web browsing records--the complete history of every click and every search term--pulled from the logs of Internet service providers (ISPs) around the world who have either sold the data to Hitwise or traded it for free analysis.
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