Fun for a Friday afternoon: Am I the only person who thinks Google Suggest is like a public Ouija board? Here’s a glimpse into what the hive mind is thinking currently about our current and immediate past presidents, according to the gnomes behind Google Suggest (that is, what are the likeliest search phrases people are entering after the words “Will Barack Obama…” or “Will George Bush…”):
I don’t know which is more interesting: that people apparently worry a lot about Obama’s security, or that the only thing anyone seems to want to know about former President Bush at the moment is whether he will be prosecuted. Could the fact that today is the seventh anniversary of the launch of the Iraq War have anything to do with that?
The beautiful visualization is courtesy of Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg, research scientists in IBM’s Visual Communication Lab and their wonderful site Hint.fm.
Here’s another fun example, discovered by my friend Ethan Zuckerman: Who will take over the world first, Google or China?