Page 10 - Decoding Decisions ~ Making sense of the messy middle

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Identifying

the messy middle

Cheap, or best?

The research project behind this report began with a hunch that there was
more to say about the evolution of choice, information, and decision-making
on the internet. The next step was to look for clues to support and expand our
initial hypothesis.

To kick off the investigation, we turned to one of our biggest resources
as researchers at Google: our search trends data. Google sees billions of

searches every day, and 15% of those queries are ones we haven’t seen
before. Our freely accessible search query exploration tool, Google Trends,
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represents a detailed history of how our curiosity and thirst for knowledge
has evolved throughout the digital age. Using Google Trends data you can
chart the fortunes of celebrities, politicians, and reality TV stars, observe the
rise and fall of a decade’s worth of memes and fads, and watch the iPhone
and Android create and define a category.

But the names of people and objects aren’t the only data points in our Google
Trends dataset. When consumers search, they often modify the query with one
or more adjectives or other descriptors. You aren’t just looking for any laptop,
but for the right laptop – however you define it. We call these additional words
modifiers, and they describe what the user wants to know about the thing they
are searching for, or add precision to their search. Modifiers provide a cognitive
and emotional snapshot, allowing researchers to see how our feelings and

needs have evolved through the lens of the things we all search for.

3 Source: https://www.blog.google/products/search/search-language-understanding-bert/