Google may know your Desires before You do

By Paul Marks


Google attempts to return relevant search results in the blink of an eye. But in future it could go one better, delivering search results to its users even before they know that they want the information.

Amit Singhal, one of Google's veteran search algorithm engineers, wants to develop a search engine that second-guesses users' needs well ahead of time. "I call it searching without searching," he said at a briefing at Google's London headquarters recently.

In future, your Google account may be allowed, under some as-yet-unidentified privacy policy, to know a whole lot about your life and the lives of those close to you. It will know birthdays and anniversaries, consumer gadget preferences, preferred hobbies and pastimes, even favourite foods. It will also know where you are, and be able to get in touch with your local stores via their websites.

No more present panic
Singhal says that could make life a lot easier. For instance, he imagines his wife's birthday is coming up. If he has signed up to the searching-without-searching algorithm (I'll call it "SWS" for now), it sees the event on the horizon and alerts him – as a calendar function can now. But the software then reads his wife's consumer preferences file and checks the real-time Twitter and Facebook feeds that Google now indexes for the latest buzz products that are likely to appeal to her.

"It might suggest I buy her an iPad and point me to some relevant product reviews," he says. But SWS might also discover, again from fishing in recent social media, that the local gadget store has a three-week waiting list for iPads. "So it would bring forward its alert to give me time to order it."

Singhal's idea taps into a growing research trend that is exploring ways to personalise search. For instance, Yahoo Research in Barcelona, Spain, has demonstrated that basic demographic information can help to reduce the ambiguity of some search terms by weighting search results towards what a particular user is likely to want to know.

Associated Link: More: Google may know your Desires before You do

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