What Google Knows about the Honest You
December 10, 2021
I read this quote in a Kleenex story about Google’s lists of popular searches:
“You’re never as honest as you are with your search engine. You get a sense of what people genuinely care about and genuinely want to know — and not just how they’re presenting themselves to the rest of the world.”
The alleged Googler crafting this statement is a data editor. You can read more about the highly selective and unverified Google search trends in “What Google’s Trending Searches Say about America in 2021.”
For me, the statement allows several observations:
- A person acting in an unguarded way reveals information not usually disseminated in “guarded” settings; for example, a job interview
- The word “honest” implies an unvarnished look at the psycho-social factors within a single person
- A collection of data points about the psycho-social aspects of a single person makes it possible to tag, classify, and relate that individual to others. Numerical procedures allow a person or system with access to those data to predict certain behaviors, predispositions, or actions.
Thus, the collection of searches, clicks, and items created by an individual using Google services such as Gmail and YouTube create a palette of color from which a data maestro can paint a picture.
Predestination has never been easier, more automatable, or cheaper to convert into an actionable knowledgebase for smart software. Yep, just simple queries. Useful indeed.
Stephen E Arnold, December 10, 2021
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