A FEW years back, a technology writer named John Battelle began talking about how the Internet had made it possible to predict the future. When people went to the home page of Google or Yahoo and entered a few words into a search engine, what they were really doing, he realized, was announcing their intentions.
They typed in “Alaskan cruise” because they were thinking about taking one or “baby names” because they were planning on needing one. If somebody were to add up all this information, it would produce a pretty good notion of where the world was headed, of what was about to get hot and what was going out of style.
Mr. Battelle, a founder of Wired magazine and the Industry Standard, wasn’t the first person to figure this out. But he did find a way to describe the digital crystal ball better than anyone else had. He called it “the database of intentions.”
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That’s really cool. I’ve never thought of it internet searches that way. And Google Trends (mentioned in the article) sounds to be an excellent to predict the future! haha.