Google Psychology Project

Preface

Google, by having the overwhelming lead in the online search arena, has an important influence on the information we receive. But beyond that, by the way it presents information, Google has an influence on the way we think.

There is an interesting page, useful for wasting time, called the Google Zeitgeist, where they provide aggregate information on what people are looking for online, and how that changes through time. You can learn, for example, that on August 23, 2004, the fastest growing three seraches are all Olympics related, while Huricane Charley and Alien versus Predator are the most rapidly declining searches.

This, then, is Google's mirror, which they hold up to us so we can see what we're thinking about. But who holds the mirror up to Google and their mystical Page Rank algorithm?

Google Psychology

In what will eventually be an automated, updating page, we attempt to plumb the depths of Google's psychology by seeing what Google thinks are the most important pages to describe certain important concepts. For each search term, we take the top three unique results (in this context, two pages are "unique" if they are not part of the same web site and not a mirror of the content of one another).






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