The Search and the Clickstream

"The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture" (John Battelle)
Ellen Kim gave me this book before I took off, and I read it while in Hong Kong. She also gave me Freakonomics : A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything" (Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner), really interesting stuff as well, but there's nothing in it I feel like blogging about (the fact that the book is back home is contributing somewhat to that disincentive).

Anyhow, The Search is worth blogging about, but there's a lot to cover, so it'll be over a few posts. The first thing worth thinking about is, as Battelle calls it, the "clickstream." The clickstream, loosely put, is the sum of everything you do online. It consists of which websites you go to, what terms you search for, and what items you buy. In other words, it's a digital paper trail.

By mining that clickstream, we can create, as Battelle puts it, a "database of intentions." As far as business is concerned, that means being able to know exactly what consumers want, when they want it, and, with a little web magic, getting it to them on the spot. That's the power of search.

More on the flip.

What makes this particularly interesting for me is how this information gathering mechanism relies only on the subconscious consent of the user. When most people use the web, odds are, they're only thinking about the explicit purpose of that usage. That is, I'm using Flickr to share some photos I took while hiking yesterday. I'm using my blog to keep my friends updated on the current dreary state of my life life. I'm using YouTube to share with folks some funny ass shit I filmed at my my best friend's birthday party. And so on.

What people don't consider is how much information the sum of all those interactions provide about a person's life. For example, as a user, most people don't think that when they use Flickr, they're announcing their brand preferences. They may simply be sharing a photo of a birthday party for instance. Yet in the background of that photo, I might notice an empty Coke bottle. And if, while watching your Flickr photostream long enough, I notice more instances of Coke than Pepsi, I could probably conclude that you prefer the former over the latter.

And while that single instance seems mostly harmless, there's a lot of data that can obtained this way. As you upload more photos and videos online, it's the equivalent of announcing your brand preferences to every marketer in the world, providing detailed information about where you were at a particular time, and even providing hints about how you feel towards certain people (e.g. by looking at the body language in all the photos you two are together).

For those of you who've seen Minority Report , remember how early on in the movie, Tom Cruise uses the image of a merry-go-round in one of the visions to figure out where a murder is going to take place? It's something like that.

And with that example, we need to worry not only about overzealous marketers but about the government as well. The NSA doesn't need to look at your e-mail if it can figure out almost as much from your publicly available blog, Flickr account, YouTube videos, bulletin board posts, facebook profile, online dating information, and so on.

But that's not really the point. The government could always figure out stuff like this whenever it really wanted to. Police officers have using these tricks ever since Sherlock Holmes was written.

What makes this different is that information is now publicly available to ... well ... anyone. What keeps them from taking advantage of that information at the moment is that it's a huge pain to sort through all of it. Yet as search technology advances, that barrier will become increasingly meaningless.

On another note, I recommend checking out John Battelle's Searchblog.

[tag]Clickstream / Database of Intentions[/tag] [tag]John Battelle[/tag] [tag]Google[/tag] [tag]Microsoft[/tag] [tag]Search[/tag] [tag]Flickr[/tag] [tag]Internet[/tag] [tag]Package Deals[/tag] [tag]Privacy and Transparency[/tag] [tag]YouTube[/tag] [tag]Facebook[/tag]