Google Is Investigating What You Don't "Search"


Bangalore: The world’s biggest search engine is finding new ways to answer probably every question asked by human beings. For Googling the “ungoogleable,” company is trying to find what type of information does people look outside the ‘search bar’ for filling their curiosity and doubts.

According to Mashable, Google is calling people at random times and asking them what they want to know at that moment. Tom Simonite at MIT Technology Review claims to be a participant of a 150 people group which Google chose to conduct the study. “Google called at eight randomly chosen times a day for three days last month, and asked “What did you want to know recently?” says Simonite. According to him, the company is trying to shape the future of how research is made by looking for the types of information that people are looking somewhere other than Google for, or simply didn’t attempt to search Google for.

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According to Jon Wiley, lead user experience designer for Google search, “if Google wants to achieve its mission of ‘organizing world’s information and make it universally accessible,’ the company should find out the hidden need of users. Maybe [these users are] asking a friend, or they have to look up a manual to put together their furniture.”  And according to him, the best way to recognize user requirements are experience sampling—bugging people to share what they want to know right now, whether they took action on it or not. “Doing that on a mobile device is a relatively new technology, and it’s getting us better information that we really haven’t had in the past,” says Wiley.

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However, Wiley is not ready to reveal the data from the study yet. But according to some participants, there are plenty of questions they never turn to Google for an answer, like “how long the line is currently in the local store” and also the questions which arise when they read some novel or cook, mainly due to the inconvenience of grabbing a PC or mobile for asking.

Google had already taken the steps towards making all this reality. The first one is Google Now, about which you can read here. There are also gadgets like Google Glass, and many others lined up from Google’s secret lab Google X. With all these, Google is quickly earning edge over its competitors, and now with more enhancements to the future searches, we can probably see Google becoming the personal assistant of future generations.

Also Read: Inside Google's Secret Lab