Friday, April 3, 2009

Google Monkeys

Whenever you search in Google, send a Gmail email, call Google’s 411 service, enter something in Chrome’s URL bar and so on, you’re adding to the data which Google can mine for other purposes than the ones you might have been immediately thinking of. Google’s Hal Varian and Hyunyoung Choi in a blog post introducing a paper on predicting the present with Google Trends [PDF] – that is, mining our aggregate search queries – quip, “It has been said that if you put a million monkeys in front of a million computers, you would eventually produce an accurate economic forecast. Let’s see how well that theory works ...”

[Via DeWitt.]

Google Monkeys by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (4)

>> More posts

Advertisement