Big Brother Google Is Watching You

Google knows what you’re going to be searching for in 12 months from now! OK, maybe not all the things you’ll Google (GOOG)–it can’t predict the next celebrity scandal or social media phenom–but, for general search queries, it knows all about you.

In a new white paper just released, Google reveals how it's working to predict future search trends.

I’m not a mathematician, so appreciated this basic summary:

For each trends sequence of interest, we take a point in time, t, which is about a year back, compute a one year forecasting for t based on historical data available at time t, and compare it to the actual trends sequence that occurs since time t. The error between the forecasting trends and the actual trends characterizes the predictability level of a sequence, and when the error is smaller than a pre-defined threshold, we denote the trends query as predictable.

Piece of cake!

Some of the findings include:

• Over half of the most popular Google search queries are predictable in a 12 month ahead forecast, with a mean absolute prediction error of about 12%.
• Nearly half of the most popular queries are not predictable (with respect to the model we have used).
• Some categories have particularly high fraction of predictable queries; for instance, Health (74%), Food & Drink (67%) and Travel (65%).

And, as the chart below demonstrates, Google’s margin of error stays pretty consistent even when making predictions 9 months out!

Click to enlarge:

Go ahead and leave a comment with your thoughts on the paper–I predict a few of you will.

Comments

[waterlily57]

It is also possible that some people are just using Google instead of using the browsers' bookmarks/favorites.

2009 Aug 19 02:35 AM

[jack dee]

not just possible , people often just type in the nearest thing and let the redirect search engine do it instead.

2009 Aug 19 02:40 AM

[Rokjok777]

Waiting for the GOOG fan-boys to chime in and say stuff like "...don't be evil..."

In reality, GOOG is already way more intrusive than MSFT ever was...

2009 Aug 21 03:54 AM