Someday, Google will know what I'm going to Google before I Google it.
It's going to see a pattern of what I watch on TV, the websites I visit during the day, and on my phone, who I talk to, where I go, what I do, the kind of business I run, the products I buy, etc, etc.
One night, I'll be watching Breaking Bad and head over to Google on my phone to see what other shows one of the Extras was in.... but Google will already know I'm probably watching Breaking Bad, and Google is going to know that I've looked up Extras before, so guess what, my Google home page is already going to be showing a list of all the Extras that were on Breaking Bad that night before I have to type anything in.
When I turn on my Google Android phone in the morning, the phone will be smart enough to know everything I check every morning. I'll see the weather forecast first, then my sales numbers, probably headlines on Reddit and HN.
When I pull up Google Maps a few days before Fathers day, it's going to know that I'm trying to find my way to various sporting goods stores, it'll automatically put them on the map before I have to type anything in.
If I'm Googling before 5am, guess what, I'm looking up the best fishing reports... it'll be on my Google Home Page.
Or will this all be in front of my face as soon as I put on my Google Glasses?
> Someday, Google will know what I'm going to Google before I Google it.
> It's going to see a pattern of what I watch on TV, the websites I visit during the day, and on my phone, who I talk to, where I go, what I do, the kind of business I run, the products I buy, etc, etc.
> Or will this all be in front of my face as soon as I put on my Google Glasses?
This is the whole premise behind Google Now, which on its current incarnation is merely the tip of the iceberg.
May be in a decade they will launch Google You. Your virtual avatar modeled after you that does all your jobs for you including calling your friends and family('s avatars).
>Someday, Google will know what I'm going to Google before I Google it.
You raise a good point that very few people understand. What information you receive determines, to a large extent, what you think. The relationship between inputs and thoughts is somewhat messy, especially for those people who can take apart ideas and put them back together in novel ways. However, people of below average intelligence, who only think in analogies to concepts they are familiar with, have behaviour and thought patterns that are very regular.
Perhaps there's a market for a serendipity app that occasionally suggests new experiences. "I see you're out shopping for Father's day -- how about taking a break for some rock climbing on your way?"
PS: Do you have a reference for people of below average intelligence thinking only in terms of analogies to familiar concepts? It seems plausible, but I'd be interested in any studies done.
I'd not put intelligence as the most important factor to predictability, the amount of shared "experiences" and similarity of context ("history") would be at the top of my list.
Someday, Google will know what I'm going to Google before I Google it.
I just can't imagine this being the case. I don't search about a subset of categorizable things, unless Random counts as a category. I'm sure neural networks could be used to pull some data out of what I search - but not enough for me to never search again. Not enough to satiate my curiosity.
> When I turn on my Google Android phone in the morning, the phone will be smart enough to know everything I check every morning. I'll see the weather forecast first, then my sales numbers, probably headlines on Reddit and HN.
I see this is scary. At the same time this is something we collectively want.
I think the problem here is not what predictive services based on our data are being offered. The problem here is that these services are being offered by a company that has much of our data. _Who_ is doing the computation is worrisome, not the computations themselves.
I would love to be able to do `apt-get install google` on my privately own server and get the same good services while keeping all my data under my roof.
> I think the problem here is not what predictive services based on our data are being offered. The problem here is that these services are being offered by a company that has much of our data.
Predictive services using your data wouldn't be much use if they weren't offered by someone with not only much of your data but also big honking scads of other data, including other people's interaction data, both to analyze to find general patterns for prediction, and to actually provide the information you need based on the predictions.
I really think that we are in a period of fundamental change regarding information. The norm has been that we find information, but increasingly information is finding us.
While I don't feel the technology is quite there yet, it's only a matter of time before recommendation/predictive systems reach a level where they are able to personalise everything that we interact with.
I don't know if our behavior can really be predicted on such a fine grained level.
Sure, you could generate a dashboard based on most viewed information. This wouldn't rocket science and could be done today.
OTOH, pulling up google maps a few days before fathers day? That could be for any number of purposes unless it knows that you always go shopping for gifts precisely 3 days beforehand.
> I don't know if our behavior can really be predicted on such a fine grained level.
There was a project in the MIT Media Lab something like a decade ago where they stuck about 100 graduate students with Bluetooth-enabled cellphones (this predates smartphones) and tracked many of their behaviors over the course of a semester. Things like phone calls, personal interactions, movements, etc.
A very interesting result from that study was that they built a model for predicting daily behaviors for their subjects with up to 79% accuracy [1]. The whole project was groundbreaking at the time, and they have some very interesting papers.
Because of my Calendar and my todo lists, and my emails with friends and family, and my searches on Google, I do think that Google could know precisely what I may be trying to map as soon as I open my maps app on my phone :)
I just emailed Mom asking what Dad might want for Fathers day, and I told my wife I'm headed out sometime this week in a text on my phone, and I searched Google for products that took me to Amazon....
So, when I pull up my map one afternoon soon after these communications, I think it will know what I'm up to - or could at least show me a popup saying "Headed Father's day shopping? Want some locations based on your recent web activity?"
I say Yes, and all kinds of fun spots and deals popup.
Google Now does some of these things. Now provides me for directions almost everyday. It also lets me know what what movie times are relevant for me. I was recently in NYC, Now gave me relevant things to do while I was there. They were great suggestions. It blew me away.
But how does it know which trips will be father's day shopping and which will be for some other purpose? Assuming you use your car more than once that week.
The result it likely to just be constant annoying spam.
Judging by Amazon's ability to suggest relevant products to my taste those predictive analytics still feel very dull. Maybe one shiny day, but it seems like a long road aheady of us.
I agree that amazon suggestions are not great, but Amazon have a fairly limited set of information to go by - only your previous purchase and search history on that site. If Amazon had the same amount of information that Google/Facebook has, they would be able to make much better recommendations.
As an aside, Amazon should really have an 'I already bought this somewhere else' button. 6 months after searching on Amazon for a watch but then buying it elsewhere, I'm still getting watch suggestions...
I know for music they have a button like that. I go through my recommended albums every so often looking for new deals and they have two buttons: 'I already own this' and 'Not interested', which means those items get hidden and it updates its recommendations.
It's actually pretty neat and I think its definitely made the recommendations more useful. I think it can be done for videos as well, but I guess they don't have it for general retail.
There's nothing real-time about it. The data (http://hawttrends.appspot.com/api/terms/) is pulled from Google Trends, but it's certainly not real-time, more like hourly updated.
Actually you will be surprised by how many do type in Title Case. I have seen many non-techies do that. I have also noticed they do this in almost every movie and TV show, when someone is using a search engine.
That may be, for lack of a better word, muscle memory/reflex for some people. I found out last semester, when I wrote out lecture notes on an ipad that there are many words I literally forgot how to spell. I can type them, and I can write them with a pen, but writing with a stylus is different enough that it took several seconds of concentration before I could write it down. I wouldn't be surprised if there are words or phrases at I always capitalize.
True story: A few years ago, Google had screens in their lobbies showing real-time Google user searches as they came in over the wire. (I don't know if they still have this, since I haven't been there in about 2 years.) I was walking through the lobby with Sergey Brin (it's a long story), and I spotted these screens and asked him if he wasn't afraid that a bunch of porn searches would come up on the screen from doing this.
"No", he said. "We have filters for that."
Just then, the word "bukkake" scrolled by.
"I think your filters should learn Japanese," I suggested :)
They do still have those screens! I spoke with one of the engineers that worked with them, and he said basically anything triggered by SafeSearch is excluded.
Note that this is not actually real time. There is one http request made when page loads and it doesn't make any more requests afterwards (just cycles). It seems to just grab top X words from different languages then repeat them.
Top X words among recent searches for that language, you mean? I assure you that "Blackhawks" is not a common English word and suggests to me the data is was generated relatively recently.
The URL indicates that it's the "hot trends", which implies that it's the currently popular searches. I agree, there's nothing here that seems to indicate that this is showing real-time searches. It's just a way to visualize the current hot search terms.
Don't believe the title. Even the URL reveals that this is just a visualization of Google Trends, which changes at less than real-time relative to individual searches.
Correct, non-misleading title would be: "Nice Visualization of Google Trends"
Ugh, how do they thing the timing of releasing this webpage is appropriate, with the NSA scandal, and people are worried more than ever about their data being harvested? Or has it been around for a while?
When I worked at Google there were projectors in the lobby which projected a sampling of queries coming through in "real time." And like you I noticed that there weren't any queries for things I knew people were querying for, so like any curious Googler I went out and found the source code for the program that did that, and yes, as you would expect, it filters out the naughty bits. (and various other searches that are attempted and of dubious moral value).
At Blekko (where I currently work) I wrote a similar application so that we could watch searches, live, on our display monitors.
It has been invaluable in identifying robotic searches and amusing to watch how some folks mangle the english language in their quest for porn, but most interestingly for me is that it is a great way to train your urban dictionary app since the OED doesn't define 'underass' but if you look at the pages that contain the term you can compute what folks take it to mean ;-), and then you can add it to the filter list.
It would be interesting to see what HN readers are searching. Rather, it would be interesting to segment further into what a specific region / group is searching.
Edit: I was just searching for Markdown on Hacker News[1]
I was just randomly clicking the searches to see what could possibly be so interesting about them... turns out it was just a bunch of people wearing clothes... and given the internet, I find that quite difficult to believe.
I don't have any evidence to support this, but I can't believe they wouldn't have any filters in place to weed out all the nasty stuff people are googling.
That said, and while the visualization is spiffy, I do not think I want the collective interest of the Internet displaying on my monitor for all to see when I am away. I've been to the Internet, and I can't say I approve of everything that goes on out there. ;)
this is not real time...it just pulls a whole bunch of data at once and makes it look like real time with the animations...it is actually animating the same data on page refresh and displaying them randomly to simulate real time...idk how often it's updated though....
I love the way that the various ISP blocks on The Pirate Bay have resulted in people apparently using Google search as an abstraction layer over the DNS. How long before the search equivalent of DNSSEC?
I would be careful about making assumptions about people's motivation.
Lots of people use Google as their primary means of navigating the internet -- nothing to do with censorship. I would guess that a Google search for "facebook.com" is one of the biggest referrers to Facebook.
Huh, nice.
They have something somewhat similar in the lobby of the Sydney office, with a 3d globe displayed on several screens with search terms being displayed on their origins.
If you watch Chrome's network activity, it shows no activity after load, and near the bottom, you find that list of terms. Still a cool visualization. It would be great if it was OpenGL and I could set it as my screensaver, or something.
The site isn't making any asynchronous requests, so there really is no "real time" aspect to this. If you look at the bottom of the page, it says "Showing the latest hot searches in All Regions".
So, these are just the top X searches from some time period, presumably after some processing and filtering (NSFW results eliminated, capitalization and spelling corrected, maybe some categories omitted, etc).
Don't they have something like this in the main entrance of their mountain view office? I could've sworn it was not filtered too, that i vaguely recall seeing something like "how to kill yourself" scroll by when I was standing in the lobby once.
I'm still a bit astonished by the number of times I've seen searches in the United States for "weather.com". Searches for "National Weather Service" I can understand, but "weather.com"?!
There's a huge number of people that either don't understand or do not care about the difference between the search bar and the address bar. I've seen this many, many times already.
And since it gives them the right result anyway... why should they change anything?
It's not real time. 3 days ago, the trends it carried have not changed much as I look at it today. While this could also mean that they've actually not changed, I highly doubt that for a country like India.
When I interviewed at Google this was running on a large LCD panel in the lobby. It was EXTREMELY laggy on that panel for some reason but it looks great now.
> We may share aggregated, non-personally identifiable
> information publicly and with our partners – like
> publishers, advertisers or connected sites. For example,
> we may share information publicly to show trends about
> the general use of our services.
DuckDuckGo gets better results than Google, especially for research, but I've been extremely spoilt by Google's extra features like images, maps, and YouTube integration.
I know you have "bang-cuts" like !g and !i, but it's kind of nice to have map results show up when you just search.
DuckDuckGo also isn't very good at troubleshooting queries. For example if I'm having a problem configuring my wireless card, DuckDuckGo won't return anything useful, but Google will find some mailing lists and/or forums answering the same or a similar question. It's getting a lot better, though.
It's going to see a pattern of what I watch on TV, the websites I visit during the day, and on my phone, who I talk to, where I go, what I do, the kind of business I run, the products I buy, etc, etc.
One night, I'll be watching Breaking Bad and head over to Google on my phone to see what other shows one of the Extras was in.... but Google will already know I'm probably watching Breaking Bad, and Google is going to know that I've looked up Extras before, so guess what, my Google home page is already going to be showing a list of all the Extras that were on Breaking Bad that night before I have to type anything in.
When I turn on my Google Android phone in the morning, the phone will be smart enough to know everything I check every morning. I'll see the weather forecast first, then my sales numbers, probably headlines on Reddit and HN.
When I pull up Google Maps a few days before Fathers day, it's going to know that I'm trying to find my way to various sporting goods stores, it'll automatically put them on the map before I have to type anything in.
If I'm Googling before 5am, guess what, I'm looking up the best fishing reports... it'll be on my Google Home Page.
Or will this all be in front of my face as soon as I put on my Google Glasses?