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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>
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
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.
I know that some geeks are anti-social, but must we resort to using search engines to find friends? ;-)
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.
I am not sure I'd want to meet the other people that are searching for "Horny coed sex slaves".
-josh
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
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.
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.
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.
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...
www.gnod.net is similar to what you are saying... I think it has quite a cool interface as well, but it not only does music, but books and films as well
As cunning as a fox, which has just been appointed professor of cunning at Oxford University. http://www.kinlan.co
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
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
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.
The name will do fine, thank you...