From Amis to Zeppelin, what your web searches reveal
Analysing what we look for on the web can offer a remarkable insight into our anxieties and enthusiasms
Oliver Burkeman
The Guardian, Saturday December 29 2007
Four years ago, the writer and internet entrepreneur John Battelle had a sudden epiphany - the kind of moment that leaves you giddy, teetering on a conceptual cliff, as you contemplate its full ramifications. Battelle had already been preaching the transformative power of the internet for some time. But now his thinking turned to the millions of web searches that people were conducting around the world each day, using Google and a handful of other sites.
As people searched, he realised, they were inadvertently leaving a trail - a gargantuan historical archive of whatever was on the world’s mind at a particular time, which remained stored on the central computers of firms such as Google, Yahoo and Microsoft.
Battelle called it “the database of intentions”. “This information represents, in aggregate form, a placeholder for the intentions of humankind,” he wrote breathlessly on his blog. What had been created was “a massive database of desires, needs, wants, and likes that can [be] archived, tracked, and exploited to all sorts of ends. Such a beast has never before existed in the history of culture … this artefact can tell us extraordinary things about who we are and what we want as a culture. And it has the potential to be abused in equally extraordinary fashion.”
Since then, the database of intentions has grown dizzyingly: in one month alone during 2007, the number of searches conducted using the five leading sites reached 9.4bn. But until recently we could only glimpse at the secrets it contained - for example, when the internet company AOL mistakenly released information on what 658,000 of its members had been searching for. (No names were released, but individual users’ search histories included eyebrow-raising anomalies: “replica louis vuitton bag … how to secretly poison your ex … how to colour hair with clairol professional …”) And in 2005 an obscure internet forum about video technology became deluged with messages after it became the top result for Google searches on the phrase “I am lonely”, which thousands of people, it turned out, were typing every day.
