Will Search Engines One Day Know Us Better Than We Know Ourselves

We were scanning this fascinating write-up over at SEOMoz about “author/agent rank” when this thought occurred to us. See, the idea is that as social media gets more sophisticated and more data is tracked, search engines could learn how much weight to give an individual’s opinion based on their past web activity.

This is different to say a smart autoresponderinstead of a business responding to negative Facebook complaints, which while it can work automated – is a lot more personal being human written. Now imagine Google’s search database plugged into a Rogerian psychoanalysis script, similar to “Eliza“.

Maybe a conversation would go like this:

“Eliza, I’m torn over my girlfriend. We have a lot in common, but we just don’t seem to click.”

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