The Database of Intentions
It's a notion that is elegantly presented in John Battelle's new book The Search. He calls it "the database of intentions." The idea is that every search entry with an Internet search engine contributes to a pattern that can be analyzed and used for prediction. Each search, he notes, offers a hint of what an individual wants to accomplish -- an itch to scratch, a problem to solve, a desire to fulfill.
Aggregate the data from those searches and, pretty quicklly, you are able to see what trends are emerging (or fading out). Marketers, whose mouths begin to water, see it as a way to forecast what consumers will buy. The Internet, in other words, can see the future. As a recent article in the New York Times put it:
When people went to the home page of Google or Yahoo and entered a few words into a search engine, what they were really doing, he realized, was announcing their intentions. They typed in "Alaskan cruise" because they were thinking about taking one or "baby names" because they were planning on needing one. If somebody were to add up all this information, it would produce a pretty good notion of where the world was headed, of what was about to get hot and what was going out of style.
Or, as Battelle has put it, Web searches are "a place holder for the intentions of humankind — a massive database of desires, needs, wants, and likes that can be discovered, subpoenaed, archived, tracked, and exploited to all sorts of ends...Such a beast has never before existed in the history of culture, but is almost guaranteed to grow exponentially from this day forward."
The NYT piece noted that the database of intentions has become ever more real with Google's recent announcement of a new offering called Google Trends. You can check the popularity of any term using this tool. And you can match the popularity to geography. Now, one town mayor -- in Elmhurst, Ill. -- is stuck explaining why more people in his town type the word "sex" into their search engines than in any other place. But forget about sex for a minute. As the piece points out:
It's the connection to marketing that turns the database of intentions from a curiosity into a real economic phenomenon. For now, Google Trends is still a blunt tool. It shows only graphs, not actual numbers, and its data is always about a month out of date. The company will never fully pull back the curtain, I'm sure, because the data is a valuable competitive tool that helps Google decide which online ads should appear at the top of your computer screen, among other things. .But Google does plan to keep adding to Trends, and other companies will probably come up with their own versions as well. Already, more than a million analyses are being done some days on Google Trends, said Marissa Mayer, the vice president for search at Google.
When these tools get good enough, you can see how the business of marketing may start to change. As soon as a company begins an advertising campaign, it will be able to get feedback from an enormous online focus group and then tweak its message accordingly.
Clearly, the database of intentions offers some promise to marketers. Expect to see Yahoo and Google begin to show linkages between searches and the searchers (demographics and psychographics). The challenge, however, is that searches are supposed to be anonymous. I imagine they will be less so in the future -- as the search engine folks offer enticements to encourage searchers to share data about themselves. That will help the search engine companies close the loop. Perhaps they will transform marketing. Perhaps they will merely predict the future.