We Don’t Lie to Google
In my stumbling around the Internets, last year I came across these two articles that inspired a project entitled “We Don’t Lie to Google.” I started working on it around July, 2010 and then abandoned it for a few months before picking it back up again.
Because we’re so honest in the search box, documenting these suggestions offers a way to look at ourselves, or at least the way Google sees us. And given that Google is constantly changing its algorithms for search results and autocompletion, we can use their suggestions to track ourselves over time.
Of course, because Google’s suggestions may take into account things that they know about the user (we’ll probably never know), I try to neutralize it by generating suggestions only when I’m logged out Google’s services. That said, it’s impossible to determine to what degree the suggestions are specific to me, which is also fascinating.
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