Thaindian News

Washington, Dec 8 (ANI): A new American study has found that religious topics are actively being searched over the Internet.

Researchers at the Pennsylvania State University reviewed over 5.5 million online searches brought together from three Web search engines between 1997 and 2005 to come up with their findings.

Jim Jansen, associate professor of information sciences and technology, and his team discovered that secularisation over the net was rare with religious and religious-related interests being mainstream.

It was also seen that the commonly held belief that religious people were less tech-savvy than non-religious people did not hold true.

Jansen said: “Our results showed that people searching for these religious topics were just as tactically skilled as the general Web population…. This actually fits well with the historical use of technology by religious groups and organizations.”

He added: “In the days of the earlier data sets, there were limited topics online…As the Internet and Web became more main stream, a cornucopia of topics emerged — religion was one.”

Jansen also found that the search engines performed poorly when hit for religious queries.

“I don’t believe it is an intentional bias on the part of the search engines,” he said. “It is probably due to the localized nature of many religious Web sites. Small businesses face similar issues in trying to get ranked within the search engines,” he said. (ANI)