“Who Is Osama Bin Laden?” … Do Teens Really Not Know?
Yesterday Yahoo put up a post on its search blog titled “Teens Don’t Know Who Osama Bin Laden Is, According to Yahoo! Search Trends.”
The story has been picked up by a long list of other outlets — PC Magazine and Gawker both claimed that “many” teens don’t know who Bin Laden was, while one site went so far as to claim that a “majority” are unaware. BoingBoing hedged its bets, claiming that “a non-insignificant number of teenagers in America do not know who Osama bin Laden is.”
But what did Yahoo’s published data actually show?
Not much, it turns out. According to the blogpost, “who is osama bin laden” was the fifth-most searched question relating to Bin Laden on Sunday, which made it more popular than questions about his height, but more popular than questions about his age. How many people searched that question? Yahoo doesn’t say. Could have been millions, could have been a handful. What it does say is that two thirds of those searching were between the
