Information Sharing by Google

A small gem of information in obscure middle paragraph in a long article in today's San Francisco Chronicle:

ABC News has an information-sharing agreement with Google, through which Google informs ABC of the fastest-rising web searches, i.e., the web search terms that are suddenly increasing in freqency. "Recently the network was told of a web search that was the fastest-rising search of the past year by a factor of 10." The story: Anna Nicole Smith's death.

It's fascinating on 2 counts: The fast that Google's mere existence can create this type of information is amazing. The internet not only enables us to access a universe of information, but here it also enables new types of information to exist. There's a strangly self-referential aspect to this, a form of positive feedback; there's also a compelling way to learn what people are thinking about.

On the other hand, the fact that so many people were interested in Anna Nicole Smith's death is, well, discouraging.

(I resisted the opportunity to put a provocative photo here in the blog...)