Is Google becoming our collective brain?
|By some estimates, Google has over half a million servers that each month crunch the equivalent of all the data in the entire library of congress 240 times over. Well over half of web users go to Google for answers to their questions, asking the machine over 400 million queries per day. Slowly but surely, Google is becoming our collective brain. Consider this: Google can now predict flu outbreaks weeks in advance simply by monitoring searches for flu terms (‘sore throat’), and aggregating this based on location. They’ve launched this service as Google Flu Trends. ‘From a technological perspective, it is the beginning’, says Eric E. Schmidt, Google’s chief executive. So where is this is all heading?
If we accept that Google is becoming the repository of all our information (via its enormous web archive of over 25 billion pages), and the collector of all our questions (via our 400 million search queries a day), it’s not a such big step to argue that by owning the input and the output, it’s becoming a collective world brain.
If Google can predict flu outbreaks, presumably its engineers can also pull back our collective mood (the world is ‘grumpy’ based on search terms), hopes, dreams and more.
Should Google become a collective asset for the world to harness in non-commercial ways?
Judging by Yahoo’s top searches for 2008 (with Britney Spears at number one), Yahoo is its teen sibling.
Tagged: collective brain, Google, technology
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YOU'RE SAYING (2)
Zac said | 9 December, 2008
I think younger generations tackle privacy fears in the most powerful way possible: they ignore it and open up their lives via services like Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and so on. A number of companies and individuals are also doing this too – negating the fear of information slippage by making all their ‘information’ public.
So to stop using one of the most powerful resources available to us for fear of exposing that one eats pho isn’t the right way to go about it, IMO.
Shouldn’t we embrace the machine and see what it can pump back to us if we think smartly about what we want to harness from our collective memes?
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MrStick said | 6 December, 2008
I think this issue will be the technological question of our generation. “What should google do with its information?”
But google does not control the input. We must remember that for every time we blame google for its non-stop march toward a privately owned incarnation of 1984 – we are the very people who give them the information.
If I install google maps on my phone I have just made the following statement: “Finding the nearest Vietnamese restaurant is worth the price of google permanently storing the date, my name, my phone number, and the fact that I eat pho.”
Google is becoming increasingly dangerous but there is a very simple way to stop its progression: stop using it.