Just a thought:

[dzuunmod]

If you go to the New York Times' homepage right now*, and scroll 2/3 of the way down, on the right side, you'll see a box labeled "most popular", which is exactly what it sounds like: lists of the most popular stories among emailers and bloggers, as well as the most popular terms to have been plugged into the search box lately

Comments

[wendykh]

they don't realize if they click on it it goes somewhere? No really (I know you said no generation gap thing) but I've found non-net savvy people honestly don't realize a BANNER is a LINK. They think of it as well, a block of text and ad. Like in the newspaper. Really.

[dzuunmod]

Well, okay. But New York Times and Olympics isn't the only example of this. Look at any big, mainstream news site on any given day, and if the story that day is a school shooting in Oklahoma, inevitably one of the top searches that day will be "oklahoma school shooting" even though it's in 40-point font on the front page.

[eclips1st]

I don't know the site much at all, but if you browse and go read other stuff do you keep the sidebars and banners? If not, it could explain why people are searching for it instead of just clicking. (just tested this and from article, if you don't go back to the main page, you would have to search.)

If not, the other reason I can see is that the site is not very user friendly/people just scan and the words don't pop out at them.

[sourdick]

My dad is like that "Let me load up Yahoo" (goes to Google, types "yahoo.com" in the search box) ... Its pretty funny

[dzuunmod]

If he's anything like my mom, I bet he could watch you just 'surf' online for about 60 seconds, and then he'd be prepared to declare you some sort of internet whiz.

[sourdick]

Back when Geocities.com was popular, my dad made a "political opinions" website, and then decided to email the 430 US Congressmen and 100 Senators with the link. We got an official warning from Videotron for that. (True story)

[fuzzyila]

I um, don't see a banner when I looked at the site just now.

[dzuunmod]

Well, now it's not at the top anymore, I guess because it's been a whole Beijing overnight since anything new happened.. There's the article about methadone, and under that, four 'more news' headlines, and under that, the banner. It's still pretty prominent though.

[gregorama]

I get where you're coming from but some people, myself included, have been trained to avoid banner ads no matter what the source or site. I realize there are proper links below and such but I'd rather do a search than click on some unidentifiable ad.

[dzuunmod]

No, it's not even a banner ad - it's a small graphic/image. If you look right now, it's at the top of the middle column. It's *clearly* not an ad.