India Uncut

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Thursday, July 06, 2006

'The database of intentions'

What we search for on the net reveals something about us, doesn't it? David Leonhardt writes in the New York Times:
A few years back, a technology writer named John Battelle talking about how the Internet had made it possible to predict the future. 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.
Well, this "database of intentions" as Battelle termed it, is public, for all of us to see: it's called Google Trends. Fascinating stuff, just like my sitemeter referral stats, which tells me that hordes of people land up at my side after searching for "Indian aunties" and "suhaag raat." Clearly I'm missing a trick by not writing more about those fascinating subjects.

Previous posts on Google Trends: 1, 2.

(NYT link via email from Balaji.)
amit varma, 4:28 PM| write to me | permalink | homepage

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