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You'd have a hard time actually reconstructing a life from a search history, because there would be so much noise. For every search that reflects an important l

You'd have a hard time actually reconstructing a life from a search history, because there would be so much noise. For every search that reflects an important life decision, there will be dozens (hundreds? thousands? I can't estimate very well) that you entered out of idle curiosity, random whims, etc. The significance of the ad is that those important searches will take place. Google will have no way of knowing which ones they are.

EricBurnett 17y ago
Yes and no. I have 18000 searches in my history, so I agree that you can't easily go through them all and trace out my life. And yet it is very simple to search it for trends, key events, or even pick a day and see what was going on then. I can do that, and Google can certainly do that (algorithmically of course). Now, I don't have a problem with that (and I value the ability to look back through my own life), but it does represent a trove of personal information.
mixmax 17y ago
Google's data-mining fu is extremely strong. This is what they do for a living. I'm sure they would be able to reconstruct a life if they choose. For every important life decision there's probably more than one search involved (having a baby? you'll search for crib, babyfood, baby crying, how to change diapers and much more) and it is certainly possible to pick that out from random searches for cribs because of boredom, checking it for a friend, etc. If you move (change IP) Google will be able to track you if you use any of their sign-in services (example@gmail.com now regularly logs in from this IP instead of the old one). Your only chance of breaking this chain is either to regularly use proxies or to change IP and gmail (and other services) simultaneously.
- nostrademons 17y ago
  This is basically the plot of Caprica. Zoe created a search engine so powerful that when she died, it was able to reconstruct her personality from publicly available information about her. Then her father downloaded her into a robot, and thus was born the first Cylon....
patio11 17y ago
You'd have a hard time actually reconstructing a life from a search history, because there would be so much noise. Did you see the analysis of the AOL data leak? There is one particular woman in there where consecutive queries and a little editing show a story of her relationship with an abusive boyfriend, accidental pregnancy, abortion, and remorse. People found it by, essentially, just grepping a flat text data file for terms they knew were likely to resolve to a hot button issue, then separating the wheat from the chaff. This is the "solution you can knock out in vi in ten minutes" answer. If you have a team of Google-style engineers, a large volume of search queries with unique IDs on them, and a Hadoop cluster available, you can make sift-and-winnow as many gigabytes as you have down to as few salient details as you want. Trivial example: I would stake money on being able to correctly identify the gender of over 80% of users given 100 searches from them, and I would be able to do this with less than one day of programming. If you let me do it in other than realtime, I would be able to do this at terabyte scales using EC2 and Hadoop. And I'm just a guy who did natural language processing in college and has a bit of basic web-fu available. Think of what you could do with a talented engineering team, deviousness, and a few months to work on it.

EricBurnett 17y ago

Yes and no. I have 18000 searches in my history, so I agree that you can't easily go through them all and trace out my life. And yet it is very simple to search it for trends, key events, or even pick a day and see what was going on then. I can do that, and Google can certainly do that (algorithmically of course). Now, I don't have a problem with that (and I value the ability to look back through my own life), but it does represent a trove of personal information.

mixmax 17y ago

Google's data-mining fu is extremely strong. This is what they do for a living. I'm sure they would be able to reconstruct a life if they choose. For every important life decision there's probably more than one search involved (having a baby? you'll search for crib, babyfood, baby crying, how to change diapers and much more) and it is certainly possible to pick that out from random searches for cribs because of boredom, checking it for a friend, etc. If you move (change IP) Google will be able to track you if you use any of their sign-in services (example@gmail.com now regularly logs in from this IP instead of the old one). Your only chance of breaking this chain is either to regularly use proxies or to change IP and gmail (and other services) simultaneously.

nostrademons 17y ago
This is basically the plot of Caprica. Zoe created a search engine so powerful that when she died, it was able to reconstruct her personality from publicly available information about her. Then her father downloaded her into a robot, and thus was born the first Cylon....

patio11 17y ago

You'd have a hard time actually reconstructing a life from a search history, because there would be so much noise. Did you see the analysis of the AOL data leak? There is one particular woman in there where consecutive queries and a little editing show a story of her relationship with an abusive boyfriend, accidental pregnancy, abortion, and remorse. People found it by, essentially, just grepping a flat text data file for terms they knew were likely to resolve to a hot button issue, then separating the wheat from the chaff. This is the "solution you can knock out in vi in ten minutes" answer. If you have a team of Google-style engineers, a large volume of search queries with unique IDs on them, and a Hadoop cluster available, you can make sift-and-winnow as many gigabytes as you have down to as few salient details as you want. Trivial example: I would stake money on being able to correctly identify the gender of over 80% of users given 100 searches from them, and I would be able to do this with less than one day of programming. If you let me do it in other than realtime, I would be able to do this at terabyte scales using EC2 and Hadoop. And I'm just a guy who did natural language processing in college and has a bit of basic web-fu available. Think of what you could do with a talented engineering team, deviousness, and a few months to work on it.