Every six months the GVU Web site hosts online questionnaires that Web users are encouraged to complete. The results, along with comments and all the raw data, are made freely available, unlike many of the commercial surveys carried out by market research companies. This makes the GVU survey particularly useful to amateur Web watchers. The sixth survey ran from October 10 to November 10, with the full set of survey results available now on the GVU Web site . More than 15,000 people filled in one or more of the six questionnaires, providing more than 59,000 answers to be analysed.
Most commercial surveys interview only one or two thousand people.
According to Colleen Kehoe, who manages the survey with fellow graduate student Jim Pitkow, the real surprise this time was the importance of data privacy to the online population. In particular, they want a statement about how the information they divulge is going to be used. With many Web sites now using a variety of methods to assemble information about their users, there is little sign of Internet publishers heeding this call. Other interesting findings relate to the sort of people using the Web. This may mark the first signs of a levelling off of the Web population, although with over 82 per cent of respondents coming from the US this may be more representative of US trends.