Is Google using your brain as you browse?
I just stumbled across a research paper published by a Google employee and a Microsoft employee entitled “A Case for Usage Tracking to Relate Digital Objects“. I have no idea who Elin Rønby Pedersen is but she’s published both on this and on Google’s much vaunted foray into organising your health data.
The paper highlights an interesting idea, potentially just as important to Future Google as Pagerank has been to Google so far. It’s not groundbreaking – you see it on, for example, Amazon. But it’s worth thinking about, applied to the whole web.
The idea is that related objects – and I use the term extremely loosely here – can be identified because you looked at them during a session of Internet browsing; you started with one, and your later browsing takes you to related objects – blog posts or news articles on the same or related subject; similar videos; etc. Your brain does the hard work of deciding what objects you’re looking for; average that with other similar datasets and Google has a pretty damn good idea of what objects on the web are related, no matter what format the object has (could be visual, textual, a flash game, a picture – they could all be related in some way that a machine has no way of ever being able to decipher the way a brain can) – the beauty of this is, the Google machine doesn’t HAVE to understand.
Evidently, there’s a lot of ‘noise’ in the data since people can be quite random when browsing, or visit an unrelated page, etc. The answer to noisy datasets is to aggregate more datasets and average them. Google definitely has access to a lot of data – just through google.com, but also the emails you send through Gmail, through content you share through Google Opensocial apps, by registering your IP each time you view their ads on any of the sites you visit, by monitoring the sites visited by anyone with a Google toolbar – etc.
This is more top-down “semantics”, and only a few companies have the capability of tracking all Internet users around the web; Google is fairly unique because it has so much share of search, email and ads (you could argue that the doubleclick merger approval really missed the significance of the move, with huge privacy and antitrust concerns going unnoticed). Two additional categories of players present themselves: your browser, and your OS. The OS could (controversially) monitor websites you visit. As could your browser. I see huge potential in Mozilla Weave – if, when I send it my web visit history data (at the moment i do that so it syncs my data between my computers), with my approval it processed the data (looking at what I did during my browsing sessions) and pooled it with that of others, it could infer relationship between objects and recommend it within a sidebar.
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