The Google Zeitgeist page shows what queries are moving up and down in popularity generally and in assorted categories. Periodically tune in to this page to watch one aspect of the changing thinking of the world's collection of minds. This ability of humans throughout the world to search on and find many of the same articles about any given topic ought to contribute to developing more commonality of outlook in heretofore fairly isolated sub-groups. Though just as significant differences of opinion remain in closely connected societies due to divergent personal interests, experiences, and innate personality characteristics so there will remain differences between groups around the world.

The New York Times reports, not surprisingly, that sex is a recurringly popular topic for searches. But Google also detects important events just after they happen:

On Feb. 28, 2001, for example, an earthquake began near Seattle at 10:54 a.m. local time. Within two minutes, earthquake-related searches jumped to 250 a minute from almost none, with a concentration in the Pacific Northwest. On Sept. 11, searches for the World Trade Center, Pentagon and CNN shot up immediately after the attacks. Over the next few days, Nostradamus became the top search query, fueled by a rumor that Nostradamus had predicted the trade center's destruction.

This ability to detect unfolding events might have a use in bioterrorism attack. There are plans afoot to automate the collection of data about symptom reports for doctors' office visits and pharmacy drug sales in order to detect a bioweapons attack before any of the victims are properly diagnosed. Well, if there are patterns of Google searches that people make for health information when family members come down with various categories of symptoms then the combination of originating IP addresses (since IP addresses usually can be assigned to geographic areas - though perhaps that isn't true for all ISPs) and disease information searches could be tracked as another way to detect the early stages of symptoms from a bioweapons attack.

I recently read the assertion (by John Derbyshire who also once again pointed to the important role played by Google) that cultural changes happen later in Canada than in the US. Well, Britney Spears is at the top of the Canadian search list at the moment and yet Spears has peaked in popularity on Google as a whole. It would be interesting to see the popularity of Spears and other major celebrities tracked by nation to see which nations jump on new celebrity icons the fastest and slowest. It would also be interesting to know whether local favoritism makes someone like Avril Lavigne a bigger search topic in Canada than in other developed English language countries and ditto for other artists that come from lower population countries who make it big.

Writing on Slate Michael Kinsley sees Google starting to do some of the functions historically done by editors

Google concedes that its choices of stories and news sources are "occasionally unusual and contradictory" but insists with uncharacteristic pomposity, "it is exactly this variety that makes Google News a valuable source of information on the important issues of the day."

Which is humbug. People still do it better. But not by much. The day is clearly approaching when editors can be replaced by computers. This requires some urgent rethinking.

He's writing somewhat tongue-in-cheek here in terms of his fears that editors and other mental workers will be increasingly replaced by computers in an increasing number of categories. But its actually true. In some cases the computers will automate just part of a mental worker's job. Take blogging for example. I bet a neural net with some additional other types of algorithms could do a decent job of doing some of the job of article selection that a web logger performs. The history of what a popular web logger posts (eg Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit) could be used to help make search queries to identify articles to post about. Google News could be searched for patterns that match the posting history of a successful blogger (said posting history would be analyzed by software perhaps using Bayesian algorithms of some sort). Also, other blogs could be watched for breaking interest stories by use of Daypop.com and MIT Blogdex. Daypop and Blogdex are already serving the function of meta-weblogs.

Of course bloggers also provide commentary and select portions of articles to excerpt. Until full artificial intelligence is achieved the earlier versions of the Blog Assistant AI software I envision could provide a list of proposed articles to blog about and a real human blogger could select from this list. The Blog Assistant could even select a proposed excerpt to use for the blog post. The blogger then accept or overrule the Blog Assistant choice. The Blog Assistant could bea learning system that gradually refines its algorithms based on choices that the blogger makes while using the Blog Assistant.

Of course, a Blog Assistant would be a lot smarter if it could somehow know what readers are thinking about. A really popular blogger (not me) gets a lot of e-mail from readers. A Blog Assistant could read the e-mail and look for patterns of reader interest. That Blog Assistant could even look at articles when the readers send links to articles and then propose to the human Blogger that particular articles submitted by readers match the blogger's interests. Also, Google search engine patterns for people who come to the blog site could be tracked and the Blog Assistant could make suggestions for popular topics to write about. Similarly, the Blog Assistant could track which posted articles get the most views as links to just those posts and then again adjust its preferences for which new articles the blogger should post about.