Sublime

“Essays Using Google Data,”

Every day, I track the digital trails that people leave as they make their way across the web. From the buttons or keys we click or tap, I try to understand what we really want, what we will really do, and who we really are.

We might call this—taking a simple method and utilizing Big Data to perform an analysis several hundred times in a short period of time—science at scale. Yes, the social and behavioral sciences are most definitely going to scale.

am now convinced that Google searches are the most important dataset ever collected on the human psyche.

But a moment’s reflection shows that the widespread use of porn—and the search and views data that comes with it—is the most important development in our ability to understand human sexuality in, well . . . Actually, it’s probably the most important ever.

The days of structured, clean, simple, survey-based data are over. In this new age, the messy traces we leave as we go through life are becoming the primary source of data.

A major reason that Google searches are so valuable is not that there are so many of them; it is that people are so honest in them. People lie to friends, lovers, doctors, surveys, and themselves. But on Google they might share embarrassing information, about, among other things, their sexless marriages, their mental health issues, their insecuriti