Our Brain and Google
Friday, December 14, 2007
Have you ever wished that you were as smart as Google, or that you at least thought with the same diligence? Well, it turns out, you do.
Scientists have discovered that the formula behind Google PageRank and how the search engine finds relevant information is very similar to the way we think, associate and remember.
It’s a truly remarkable discovery that makes a lot of sense once you think about it. Take the Google PageRank, for instance. Google determines a page’s rank or importance by the number of sites that link to it, as well as the importance of those sites and who links to them.
This means that if you have a website and 100 of your friends linked to your site from their sites, you might still have a somewhat low PageRank. This is because your friends are not really all that important in the larger scheme of the Internet. But, if you had a website and the New York Times and Newsweek linked to it, your PageRank would be pretty high, because those two sites are very important.
In this same way, our brains categorize information. Just think about all the nonsense you come across every day. Can’t? That’s because your brain has chosen to bury it in its depths; perhaps, on the 20th page of search results, for example.
Now try to recall what you were told on your last performance review. It’s all coming in crystal clear, isn’t it?
What’s most interesting to me about all of this is that we are learning about our brain function from formulas we (well not me, and probably not you… most likely someone much smarter) created for a search engine.
As an article in World Science pointed out through quoting this month’s issue of the research journal Psychological Science, the approach of the scientists who discovered this similarity “indicates how one can obtain novel models of human memory by studying the properties of successful information retrieval systems, such as Internet search engines.”
The article goes onto to say that, likewise, programmers developing new applications for search engines are “likely to find good solutions by studying the mind.”Labels: Google, Internet, seo
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