Hal Hodson, technology reporter
The world has new borders, or at least new ways of looking at the old ones. Two computer scientists have developed an application that mines Google Instant's autocompletion feature to paint a picture of the planet as Google measures it.
Google Instant works by offering up search results while users are typing in their query, based on what people commonly search for in their part of the world. Screenshots of amusing suggestions are an internet phenomenon, but Antoine Mazi?res from INRA-SenS and Samuel Huron of INRIA, both in Paris, France, used Google's algorithms to measure cultural trends instead.
The system is called Zeitgeist Borders. It lets anyone collect and analyse autocompletion suggestions from around the world for a certain phrase, pushing searches through all of the different top-level domains that Google runs, such as google.fr in France. The results are displayed on a world map, with the most popular words to complete a search term displayed for each country - though it works in English only.
Google limits the number of queries it will handle over a certain period of time, blocking IP addresses that rapidly make 10 queries, which prevented Mazi?res and Huron from doing a larger statistical study. However, the researchers have opened up the application's source code, and are currently working on ways to get around the limits. "A larger-scale analysis would allow systematic analysis of the cultural differences between countries," they write in a paper on the system which they will present next month at the Web Science conference in Paris.
One of the oddest findings was over a query about children. "Most countries ask 'why kids are the worst', or [why they] lie, but India is the only one asking why they 'vomit' and 'don't eat'," Mazi?res wrote.
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