India Uncut
This blog has moved to its own domain. Please visit IndiaUncut.com for the all-new India
Uncut and bookmark it. The new site has much more content and some new sections, and you can read about them here and here. You can subscribe to full RSS feeds of all the sections from here.
This blogspot site will no longer be updated, except in case of emergencies, if the main site suffers a prolonged outage. Thanks - Amit.
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:
Previous posts on Google Trends: 1, 2.
(NYT link via email from Balaji.)
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.)
