what about bing?
The point of the Database of Intentions (Battelle points out, and I should too, that this isn’t a real thing- just a concept he named) is that the subset of the entire world’s population that’s on the internet is making the decisions for you. This was the revolution of Google: from search engines that made decisions about information to engines that used the decisions that people made to provide search results.
it’s all about search
The policy implications of all of this stuff are vast. Battelle mentions some examples of situations in which the Database of Intentions can give us a clearer picture of anything from local to global policy issues, and we touched on this idea briefly in class. Recently, Google teamed up with the CDC for Flu Trends, which puts to work nascent Google ideas about tracking the Database of Intentions with the hope of curtailing the spread of H1N1 in particular and infectious disease in general. More broadly, Google Trends allows anyone to see and interpret data about what people are searching for, or have searched for, at any given time on Google. The CDC could use Google Trends to find out, as Battelle suggests, where suburban moms get answers about cancer, and create a targeted public education campaign based on that information.
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