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Finding Friends Via Search Query Analysis
prostoalex writes "How many times have you met an interesting person, who happened to check out the same book in the library, or listen to the same music as you do? Researchers from University of Chicago suggest that it would be kinda cool if you could find like-minded people by analyzing the queries submitted to a Web search engine. Their PDF paper explains the research in more detail."
Is that you?
Je t'aime Stéphanie
What, no I'm not a stalker...
What do you mean.... Hello?... Hello?
Get your own free personal location tracker
So, if the government or a corporation tracks an individuals surfing habits, it's bad. If we do it to get a date, it's good.
Perhaps I'm missing something.
Sipping on Jolt and Dew. Laid back. With my mind of my cubicle and my cubicle on my mind.
Forget about search queries, what about referers? I've met a lot of interesting people by looking at the referrer logs for my blog/website, and following them back to their blogs. I've even met some of them in person after talking to them online.
Talk about coincidence... I met someone <wink wink> less than 50 miles from me, who linked to an obscure page on my web site.
Direct marketers have been compiling this sort of information for years. From it they know that I'd like to increase various body parts, want a mortgage, need septic tank service, enjoy RC cars, and would like to meet other people and animals. Works flawlessly!
http://matchmaker.google.com/
The real problem is friends aren't necessary pope with the same interests. Rather it is the combination of similarities and differences that make a successfully friendship. While this might get you started I am not sure it will be that successful.
This will result in every porno watching person from perverts to pedophiles to unite into one large and dangerous organization.
Also privacy, spam, etc. Don't want one guy who looked for porn one time to get sucked into 10 porn mailing lists or anything like that.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
Finding somebody just like me? Fuck No! I can't even stand one of me.
Table-ized A.I.
I remember the days before the internet when people actually spoke to each other. I'm fairly sure that conversation is far more effective than analyzing search patterns and much faster too. Don't forget that the shortest distance between you and that person's bed is a straight so stop trying to hack their personality.
Of course, this is only a suggestion and nothing that I'd actually do myself; I'm more the stalker type.
I'm tired of bombing the universe
What about AudioScrobbler? They use the music that you listen to and compare it to the music other people listen to. They then find people with similar music tastes to you, and then you can expand your tastes by looking at what they listen to.
(see my audioscrobbler>
...with some sort of anonymous chat environment.
/joined to the 'group' of algorithmically similar queries. If it's something technical, possibly make a cooperative hookup or get a quick answer out of someone. If it's something recreational, maybe find a like-minded individual- and based on the trust algorithms in your wetware, possibly exchange persistent contact info via a private IM/IRC-style PRIVMSG.
Throw a query; get
This'd have nice implications for both tech support and pornography- no doubt the two most popular search-engine applications. (Note that most people into truly obscure niche porn probably have persistent anonymized accounts on other services, e.g. Yahoo Pr0-er, Groups, or MUCKs or somesuch.)
Oh that would turn out just great- you'd have people seeing anything related to girls, technology, Trek, or sex and people would be jumping "they're my soulmate!" probably only likely to find someone a little too much like them (male, lonely, looking for love in all the wrong places, looking for love in new search-based interfaces).
Now I know that I am not a pervert for constantly googling for lesbian pr0n, I'm a member of a community of friends. I feel so loved.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
The government [is] extremely fond of amassing great quantities of statistics. These are raised to the nth degree, the cube roots are extracted, and the results are arranged into elaborate and impressive displays. What must be kept ever in mind, however, is that in every case, the figures are first put down by a village watchman, and he puts down anything he damn well pleases.
-- Sir Josiah Stamp
Sounds like computerized dating services to me. you would think they would have died out, but no, theyve only gotten more automated and flashier.
if computers could make babies, id just want a computer dating server. beautiful full tower looking for same cpu mate. contact mw at 10.2.2.2
-foxxz
This sounds like it could be fun/interesting, except there are obvious privacy implications, including, of course, spammers blanketing searches for products, etc. and then trying to contact people who are legitimately using the service. As always, the rule of thumb is to surf anonymously.
what I always wanted was a blind date with another heterosexual guy interested three ways with supermodel lesbians
I know that some geeks are anti-social, but must we resort to using search engines to find friends? ;-)
so how do you spot hot chicks?
Not the best way to find a new best friend I think, but if you wanted to commit a crime that needed accomplices it would be a lot easier to find like-minded individuals whose real names you wouldn't know.
Just search for the other person that's searching for people's searching habits.
I am not sure I'd want to meet the other people that are searching for "Horny coed sex slaves".
-josh
Search: "Porn + Jedi + Tux + Fuck RIAA + down ashcruft"
Results : 120323000 unique results
Identical members mapping: 23,00300
Siggy Say, Siggy Do
How is this any better than joining an IRC channel or a messageboard on the topic you are interested in? Rather than finding people who typed your interest into a search engine, just go on dalnet or something and type /list yourinterest
I doubt that even the combined resources of government and corporations could get many of us dates!
I can imagine one big group of male, aged 13 to 21, made friends by this system due to the common porn interest.
Hi Natalie Portman,
I realized by monitoring your searching habits that we have sooo much in common...i too am an only child. i too have been a vegetarian since the age of 8. i too became a vegetarian because i saw a demonstration of laser surgey on a chicken at a medical conference with my father. i too can speak fleuent Hebrew, French, and Japanese. i too have hobbies such as : Dancing, Reading, Writing, Acting, Ice-skating Can we please one day get together and watch Friends and Ellen together??
purty purty please??
- you are sofa king weed todd did
There's a site called mediachest.com which lets you keep track of what dvds, games, cds, and books you own, then see what your friends own and it lets you create sharing networks between yourself and friends and people you know.
The relevancy here is that because your collection is in the site's database, you have the ability to find other people with similiar interests and those can be narrowed down to people local to you (close to a certain postal code). It even lets you find like minded people based on what school you go to.
My DVD and Game Collection Tracking L
What if you could do the reverse, and given a person's name and shit, retrieve their browser cache? Hmmm...
why not darnit?!
"Opposites attract..."
webpage
Right.
If we do it to get a date, it's good.
Right again.
Perhaps I'm missing something.
Nope, you've got it just fine!
The coolest voice ever.
Researching to sell products results in better competition in business because they can offer more of what someone needs and less crap that they don't. Researching unsuspecting prospective friends/mates/victims is creepy. It would be alright if you were actively signing up for something (like a dating service or a find-a-friend service), but if this is a tactic that sites are going to just automatically enroll you in and anyone can get the results: count me out. It's just creepy!!
xxxxxxxxxx
It's your mess. YOU clean it up!
Just what I've always wanted -- a way to meet a bunch of pr0n-hungry perverts.
If there's one thing I learned at the asylum, it's that your phsyciatrist is your best friend.
It was fun, in general. We were going for walks in the park, there were free drugs (if you knew from which of the corrupted doctors to get them) and you could show your penis to the nurses with no offense. But then I had to leave....
There used to be a "search voyeur" CGI that would show you the searches that were recently performed on some search engine or another. It was fun to watch, but was sometimes frustrating. You'd see someone search for "Japanese women" and you would want to edit their search and do "Japanese women +naked" because you knew that's what they really wanted, but were too newb to do it right.
Then, there would be the guy who would search for "Windows sucks Linux roolz" and you'd wish you could start chatting with him.
But finally I made my own website, and now I can search the referrer logs (hint: grep for "?query=" b/c it seems a pretty common referrer string) for funny searches. My favourite was someone searching for pictures of naked women fishing. Is there some popular naked women fishing fetish out there or something? I'd never heard of it. But the searches kept bringing up my pages, and people kept clicking through.
fifth sigma, inc.
Interests are common everywhere, but in places where most people are pretty much the same, this can be an important tool for meeting new and interesting folks who are as much like you.
I would like to see a web sight that is much the same, but with a "Hot-or-Not" option to help find girls that I like.
I suggest you read Slashdot
a million stalkers rejoice
attractive women everywhere weep
as if this is a good thing
anonymity is much beter than anything this tech can do
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Yet another money making opportunity for Google. :-)
Of course, I really don't want to meet the woman who's doing the same kind of searches I do... ewww.
Most of my interests or on-line. Most people who type search queries related to those interests will find my website. Thus, most IP addresses in my web server log should be useful.
And for those without a website, or a shitty one, there's Meetup.com.
Funny how scientist think it would be cool do something we've all be doing for years already.
Male, 27, good healt, searching a women to share activities and interests like: ...(herm)... xxx, celeb, facial, bukkake, pantihose, lesbians, anal, blow job, free xxx pass, tits, hard core sex, pussy fuck, bondage, asian porn, teens, foot job, female ejaculation, big tits, small tits, average tits :p, juicy pussy, and allTheFuckingSexualPerversionInTheWorld ... ...anyone interested ?
gerbils bootlicking tights spoons tarzen
ahh...my love toy is just a search away from being discovered...but, others see my searches too then? doh!
But...if these people have similar tastes to you, then you're listening to the same kinds of music as before, right? They need a service that takes what kind of music you hear too much of, then forces you to listen to something completely different, to make you expand your horizons. Kind of like a TMBG / NWA* exchange program.
*insert current group that's popular with the urban kids today.
but im already affiliated with a group of like minded people, I'm a registered sex offender.
And when a new moves to town, the authorites tell everyone.
This idea is rather like something that's already available on LiveJournal. Users have the option to list anywhere up to 100 interests. You can then search for people who have a specific interest listed (it brings up both people and communities), but even better is if you're a paid member - you can search for people who share the highest number of common interests. The only down-side is that sometimes when you find a really cool person, their journal will have been inactive for a year or two.
Karma: Ran over your dogma.
Friends would look for the same subject matter.
If you're looking for a date you should search for opposite subject matter.
Imagine typing:
"Hot 20yo blond chick"
and getting matched up with others looking for the same thing?
You'd want to type "geeky nerd with a slightly smelly pile in the back of his room". Bound to find a soulmate if someone matches up with that...
I remember filling out a 10+ page plus form to find a "like minded person" to room with freshman year. What a crock. So this is some big revelation?!?
Giving up privacy for some sex, very nice.
.smell my feet.
The only reason to track such information about a person is if you intend to screw that person.
If the government wants to screw you, its bad.
If an attractive member of the opposite sex wants to screw you, its good.
If an attractive member of the same sex wants to screw you, um... I leave that for you to decide.
END COMMUNICATION
Sadly, I'm not joking here.
It's a kind of interesting site to meet people and it shows how you are connected to others on the site through your friends.
Friendster tells you what city someone lives in and lists some favorite books, movies tv shows etc.
So far there are only 3 Canadians on friendster, but there are lots from Tulsa OK.
"A witty saying proves nothing." -Voltaire
All the major IM clients already do this.
Newsgroups, mailing lists, book clubs, amazon.com...
All of them are opt-in sort of communities and are just fine for meeting like minded people and trolls. The only advantage another system has is if it's involuntary, which sucks.
Time to set up those off shore anonymous remailers and dust off my foil hat. I'm first in line for cmdrtaco@leavemethehellalone.cx.
Sounds to me like a great and easy way for the government to make "friends" with political dissidents or suspected criminals of any nature.
Let's say that you match 100% with student A, and less than 80% with everybody else. Somebody else also matches 100% with student A and 80% or less with everybody else. Who gets to room with student A? Or, another way to look at it: you have 3 perfect matches, but only two can fit in a room. Somebody has to be left out in the cold. I also suspect that whatever the college used to match room-mates was something less than optimal. No doubt, those forms were scrupulously analyzed by the same highly dedicated, hard-working, midnight oil burning employees who analyzed your application essays. Yeah, right.
When it was 4 o'clock, all they could probably think about was making sure that Blacks got to room with Whites. At 5 o'clock, they just shuffled the forms like cards and went for beer.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
(NT)
The big brother-esqe comments are funny, but on the mark. If I'm searching for something, I'm conducting "personal business," I'm not trolling for dates.
On the other hand, a weblog is a place where people actively promote their interests. What we need is a place where you can find webloggers who are interested in the same stuff you are interested in, based on comparing what you write about.
Oh, yeah, we have that already.
instead of the perverts' utopia endorsed by the great-grandparent post. A little preching and a little spanking never hurt anyone. But the scars of child abuse are never outgrown. :~(
By the way, this is a christian nation. Settled by exiled christians who were looking for a place to escape persecution. That had nothing to do with renouncing their beliefs, which the reader can research for themselves by doing a google search for 'puritans'.
Is there scope in the market for a non sex based matchmaking service, a 'FindPeer' service to encourage one on one peer (or coach or mentor) based short relationships? I did a rough spec and
wiki page on such a service but at 10 hits from google in 4 months maybe it is not worth more investigation without more marketing!
Most newsgroups and slashdot items seldom lead to interesting one on one discussion except perhaps for aggressive self opinionated 'experts' (allegedly).
FYI I may have time for some one on one discussion but not necessarily to join an open source programming project, and the local linux group does not seem approachable enough for this purpose. Also the peer development may not necessarily be in the computing field.
Signed a meek want-to-be peer developed with 10 years developer experience.
Be Free: Free Software Tuition
I think this would make me a lot more conscious of what searches I did. I'd be worried about making a good impression, so I'd start pretending to have a lot more refined interests than I actually do.
I've actually found that most people come equipped primitive carbon-based CPUs that, while they aren't capable of fast calculations, are very good at basic p2p information sharing techniques. If you take advantage of the speech synthesizers which come standard in most people you can learn about their web searching habits rather directly, without sifting through logs. What's more, there exist places outside of the internet where lots of different people actually go to meet each other and engage in such p2p information sharing. I think they call it "conversation."
User #1 Search: Kinky porn (For Pleasure)
User #2 Search: Animal Mating habits (For school paper)
Person matched up via search habits: So, You like Beastiality?
User #2 Responds: WTF?!?!
(Score:0, Interesting)
Bugsy Brown....
:(
But seriously, the only people I'll be stuck meeting are ones who can't spell
I'm fortunate to work and live with a group of people with whom I have just enough interests in common. And, despite the obsolete sexism and general lack of PC, I rather liked Ogden Nash's observation that it didn't hurt for husband and wife to be a little incompatible, provided he had income and she was pattable. How do we analyse for this?
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
Yeah, but can you sleep with them? That seems to be more along the point of this article.
Lots of sites use the old Firefly technology or something similar to project what you might like by comparing you to other people who currently have similar tastes. Amazon.com actually allows you to rate products that they recommend if you already own them. This gives them even more information to try to guess stuff they could sell you.
Actually, no. This isn't a christian nation.
It may have been originally settled by Puritans, but they weren't the only ones here when the constitution was created. In fact, the constitution expressly forbids discrimination over religion.
If this were simply a christian nation, there would be only one legal religion here.
Of course, this is WAY off topic.
Amen brother!
I work in a pretty small IT shop and I'm the only one that does what I do, the rest have other specialties. When I'm in situations where I'm immersed in other IT people like myself I always remark on how much I *dislike* those people, even though we share a lot of the same interests.
I find the same thing to be true in a lot of areas -- a lot of the people that I find that like X I don't like, even though we both like X.
The people I do like and spend time with have more subtle and abstract similarities from a personality perspective, and in ordinary ways are quite different from me, which is usually a good thing.
I find what interests me in people is uniqueness of perspective and depth of feeling. People with John Q. Public opinions and no feeling about them don't turn me on. People that feel passionately about something unusual I find fascinating, even if I find their opinions unappealing.
I'm familiar with someone who embraces a lot of pretty scary far-right attitudes on politics, race, and so on, but he's capable of explaining them in an intelligent and thoughtful way. At the end of the day I disagree with him, but I still think he's very interesting.
LM331
rechargeable 1512
place names
lorentz transformation
TLC272
solar panel
energy meters
16F877
hydroelectric power output
carbon 14
(all from recent memory, there is others along the same lines)
What kind of profile does that really show?
SIGBUS @ NO-07.308
Wow, that is fascinating. Despite the fact that IBM has been doing this internally for 5 years already.
Instead of paying $20 to have a woman reject me, I can spend $78k. Where do I sign up?
Shame on me for not knowing the name of the product, but the search engine that Microsoft and BP use on their intranets has this sort of functionality. When you do a search, you can check a box that says "list me for future people that search for this" (or something). Then the next person that searches for the same thing gets your name as well as the results, so they can perhaps collaborate with you on the same topic.
Don't you and these "friends" of yours already get the same exact marketing emails via this same exact technology?
Stumbleupon seems to follow the article the closest. Surf websites, rate them as good, bad, or great, and once you've built a database of favourite sites, find users that share the same interests.
They have a toolbar for Firebird browser, btw.
... if she's *the* girl who spends her time querying for faulty hardisks making i/o errors, php manual and howtos!
:)
plus, everybody on many sites i'm often on (not offending anybody by naming one!) would be after *that* same girl!
no thanx!
If you have a blog and want to find like-minded bloggers try out BlogMatcher. There are a lot of blogs out there and most of them are terribly boring. This tool helps narrow down the blogoshpere to those blogs that have some of the same links as your blog.
FoundNews.com - get paid to blog.,
My 4 year old is just learning the internet.
I was showing him Google (which he calls Gooooogle
because of all the 'o's in the nav images) and
I asked him for a search term. He came up with "crocodile sky". There were hits.
I don't want to know anyone who also searched for that. Or do I?
I love teh int4rw3b!!!!!111one1
I could find people "just like me" and send them email about penis enlargement and home equity loans. What a great idea! They're "like-minded," so this should not bother them at all, right?
I have the impression this was featured on Slashdot a few months ago already. I think someone proposed to use the Slashdot friend/foe system in a similar fashion.
Sigged!
is sex the most queried for term on google ?
We could be digging a graveyard to get parts to "build" friends...
"Master, it could be worst... it could be raining!"
"Thunder!"
better get to know like monded people in discussion boards. or make a website and mention in these specialised boards, even group services like yahoo or google.
I knew there was something wrong with NT.
Eh, to be precise: NEVER!
I meet people in a number of ways, but not by my shopping habits (unless you count beer). Can anyone seriously say that they have met a friend by choosing the same item in a shop (or library, etc...)
Researchers from University of Chicago suggest that it would be kinda cool if you could find like-minded people by analyzing the queries submitted to a Web search engine
Yeah, I would love that, if people could contact me based on my searching habits. The people who would do that would surely be really interesting people, and must live a fun life!
But what does actually "coed" mean. And why has it become so much used in pornography and nowhere else?
If you can't stand yourself, there are plenty of suicide FAQs on the net, you can rid the world of your pestilence quite easily.
I think you mean to say, you can just barely stand yourself. Which is the problem, with Xanex, Paxil and all these other aids, we're preventing marginal people (like yourself) from removing themselves from the planet.
<tongue only slightly in cheek>
-- Ender, Duke_of_URL
Jews were some of the first western people over here, fleeing from RC forced conversions...
And Indians were here first, we stole this country against international law, american law, and moral law.
Primarily because of Christians pushing a 'god-fearing' country concept. If we eliminate the christians and the islamics... we might get back to a more peaceful world...
No more moral crusades, or holy wars.
-- Ender, Duke_of_URL
you might have a lot of common interests to talk about...
Just don't be offended if nobody wants to shake your hand...