Daily Mail: empirical fail

So I saw this article linked by a friend of mine (who really should know better). The main thrust of the piece was that young people don't know who the newly deceased terrorist, Islamist-fanatic and noted hide and seek specialist, Osama bin Laden is. Or to put it another way "teenagers appear to be oblivious to what is actually happening in the world." The case for the prosecution is that the "internet was flooded" with searches with the question "who is Osama". The Mail went on to assert that:

"According to Yahoo!, 40 per cent of searches on Sunday for 'who killed Osama bin Laden' were from people ages 13 to 20. But teenagers aged 13 to 17 made up 66 per cent of searches for the question 'who is Osama bin Laden?"

OK, firstly, who the fuck uses Yahoo anyway? I mean really, this isn't a very fair representation if every vaguely intelligent person is out of the equation because they, de-facto, wouldn't even think about using Yahoo in the first place. As for the "statistics", particularly the second of the pair quoted above, I'd be a good deal more concerned about the 34% over the age of 17 oblivious to the big O. That's the real dereliction of knowledge here not people who were toddlers at the time (although admittedly that is stretching it a bit). But then if you don't know what Google is then an out of vogue war lord is hardly going to illicit much attention is it now.

However, following the apparent tsunami on Yahoo "scores" then "turned to Twitter to pose the question". Yes that's "scores" of people on a service with a global reach of 150 million people needed clarification. Fatuous and utterly inane.