How Smart is Google? And how much smarter can it get?

Google is building the infrastructure that will revolutionize the PR/propaganda industry. And in the process, it's enabling those with money to achieve fine-grained, insidious control over the rest of us.

Checking my email this morning, I noticed (by chance, or by design?) this banner add:

Sarah Palin for VP - YouTube? .com/Palin - Watch the Latest Official Campaign Video on Sarah Palin! Sponsored Link

Nothing particularly interesting about campaign advertising making the digital leap, right? But how did it get there? Was it just one of the many completely untargeted ads Google still sells and randomly shows off? Or does Google know something about me that I, amateur introspecter, haven't pieced together yet? Does it think I'm interested in learning more about Sarah Palin? That I'm a voter with an open mind? Or does Google think that, by steering my investigation towards the right subset of information about Palin, I'll be influenced enough to change my vote--change my behavior?

I suspect Google doesn't know. At best, it's just guessing, for now. Poorly. After all, I can't even vote. But as its prediction algorithms become better, as the size of its data-set about me grows, that guess will only get more accurate. If the engineers at Google were in the business of making predictions about my behavior--and there's no reason to suspect they're not, given how valuable such information would be--they would have all the tools they need to test their hypothesis empirically. And the subjects of the experiments would be none the wiser.

How? Simple. Throw a banner add about Palin across the top of someone's gmail account. Record if they follow the link, or later search for the video on YouTube? , or search for it on Google. Record how much of the video is watched. Check if the ad generates any outgoing emails about Palin, or any blog posts on blogspot. Monitor how many people emails are sent to, and how many people read the blog. Evaluate their behavior. In short, figure out which people are very good at influencing the opinion of their peers, and what makes these super-influencers tick. Experiment to determine how to influence people's behavior directly, and through intermediaries. The possibilities are endless for making the whole process of influence so subtle and diffuse that one caught in its crosshairs would never even begin to suspect he's being targeted. Without suspicion, no defenses. (insert research on persuasion and skepticism about motivation of the source)

Propaganda has been around as an industry since before the first world war. Many have tried to use it to further personal interests at the expense of the public since that time--often with considerable success. But we are slowly getting wiser to the P.R. industry's methods. Too bad we'll never know what hit us when Google gets into the game.

-- AndreiVoinigescu - 09 Sep 2008