Info on global Google searches

martin

----
Is there any way to track how often a certain set of keywords is typed into Google? For instance, if I wanted to see how many people typed in an exact search for "maris piper always cheating bubbles" during 2007, could I do it?
 

bnek

Well-known member
derailing a bit, but does google have complete ownership of all this data? i mean, if whatever authority/government requests info about an individuals search history do they have to give it up?
to whom, and under what circumstances is google obliged to reveal this info?
 

nomos

Administrator
trends, e.g...

trends.gif
 

faustus

Well-known member
There seem to be lots of old google threads, so I thought I'd resurrect one

Has anyone else noted that the autocomplete on the google search box abruptly turns off if you're typing something you *shouldn't*?

E.g. you can get as far as 'files' and there are lots of suggestions (including, for me at least, one where the next letter is 't') but as soon as you enter a t (filest) it appears to panic that you're going to type filestube and there are no more autocomplete suggestions.

Would be nice to see the complete list of words that it doesn't autocomplete. I guess it's similar to that recent story about Siri on the new iPhone not being willing to direct users to abortion clinics. Google doesn't have that particular problem, but there must be some interesting elisions out there
 

4linehaiku

Repetitive
Out of date I think, but quite a lengthy list of autocomplete banned search terms here: http://www.2600.com/googleblacklist/
Some of them are pretty amusing.

Think the Siri abortion clinic think was semi-debunked actually. The problem was that planned parenthood places and the like weren't identifying themselves as abortion clinics, due (I assume) to the negative connotations among the mental pro-life lot. So they are listed as 'medical centres', which obviously don't match the query. Just boring machine learning stuff, rather than a specific conspiracy.

The unintended consequences of these sorts of impersonal algorithmic omissions are a whole other topic, and one that will obviously become more and more important as our reliance on them increases.
 

slowtrain

Well-known member
There seem to be lots of old google threads, so I thought I'd resurrect one

Has anyone else noted that the autocomplete on the google search box abruptly turns off if you're typing something you *shouldn't*?

E.g. you can get as far as 'files' and there are lots of suggestions (including, for me at least, one where the next letter is 't') but as soon as you enter a t (filest) it appears to panic that you're going to type filestube and there are no more autocomplete suggestions.

Would be nice to see the complete list of words that it doesn't autocomplete. I guess it's similar to that recent story about Siri on the new iPhone not being willing to direct users to abortion clinics. Google doesn't have that particular problem, but there must be some interesting elisions out there

Haha, I've never noticed this.

I always thought it would be funny if I typed in an album title, and it would always suggest ".zip" or "blogspot" on the end.
 

faustus

Well-known member
thanks for the blacklist, haiku, it's interesting reading although almost exclusively porn. But your point about the unintended consequences is, I reckon, the really interesting one, although I'd find it hard to articulate it.

something that springs to mind (although it's not exactly the same thing) is the final chapter of Jennifer Egan's A Visit From the Goon Squad, set about twenty years in the future, and a little paragraph on how language has changed:

Rebecca was an academic star. Her new book was on the phenomenon of word casings, a term she’d invented for words that no longer had meaning outside quotation marks. English was full of these empty words—”friend” and “real” and “story” and “change”—words that had been shucked of their meanings and reduced to husks. Some, like “identity,” “search,” and “cloud,” had clearly been drained of life by their Web usage. With others, the reasons were more complex; how had “American” become an ironic term? How had “democracy” come to be used in an arch, mocking way?​
 
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