Google maps the future
The amount of information that Google and other search engines have collected is like nothing else that has ever existed. The sheer staggering amount of data out-leaps what the mind can contemplate. The name “Google” is a play on the mathematician’s very large number, the googol (1 followed by 100 zeros), and they are living up to the name. What Google can or will do to continue to mine this unprecedented mountain of data is unknown. But one of their latest efforts is a little scary. It is described in a column in today’s NY Times, “The Internet Knows What You’ll Do Next” .
In his column, David Leonhardt describes how John Batelle pointed out that the Internet should make it possible to predict the future by creating a “database of intentions”.
When people went to the home page of Google or Yahoo and entered a few words into a search engine, what they were really doing, he realized, was announcing their intentions.
They typed in “Alaskan cruise” because they were thinking about taking one or “baby names” because they were planning on needing one. If somebody were to add up all this information, it would produce a pretty good notion of where the world was headed, of what was about to get hot and what was going out of style.
The article also notes this observation from Batelle
The collective history of Web searches, he wrote on his blog in late 2003, was “a place holder for the intentions of humankind  a massive database of desires, needs, wants, and likes that can be discovered, subpoenaed, archived, tracked, and exploited to all sorts of ends.”
Google and other search engine companies have been using their databases for designing advertising but until recently the general public did not have access. Now Google has changed that
A few weeks ago, Google took a big step toward changing this  toward making the database of intentions visible to the world  by creating a product called Google Trends. It allows you to check the relative popularity of any search term, to look at how it has changed over the last couple years and to see the cities where the term is most popular. And it’s totally addictive.
At the end of his article, Leonhardt writes
In the 19th century, a government engineer whose work became the seed of I.B.M. designed a punch-card machine that allowed for a mechanically run Census, which eventually told companies who their customers were. The 20th century brought public opinion polls that showed what those customers were thinking. This century’s great technology can give companies, and anyone else, a window into what people are actually doing, in real time or even ahead of time.
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