A Temporally and Spatially Aware Google

Google Search has been temporally and spatially aware for quite some time now, but today was the first day I took this for granted.  I wanted to know the score of the Eagles game before I got home from brunch, and I do not have a goto sports scores app on my Blackberry. So I just Googled “philadelphia eagles,” because I remembered seeing either through a blog post or a previous search I had done the score to a sports game on the Google one box search results page.

It seems like Google has been doing more to make search temporally aware. More importantly, they have been doing a better job of educating me about this new dimension of search, driving me back to the one box with queries I may have previously performed via a more verticalized channel ( like the Eagles website or an app like Sports Tap).

I’ve also noticed spatially aware search results making their way higher up the one box results. Although the verticalized search I default to for this is also a Google product, Google Maps, knowing that I don’t need to go to a separate service to get results specific to my geographic location is an important and subtle behavior Google is training me to have.  Check out my Google results for “whole foods:”

localized Google search results for whole foods in nyc

Adding this kind of personalization is a constant reminder to me how good Google is at organizing the world’s information: in this case, they are organizing and making useful my personal spatial/temporal data. By constantly demonstrating the added value of personal data, Google just makes me want to give them more and more data.

On the one hand, it’s kind of scary how much Google knows about me. On the other hand, I see how much time Google saves me and I still want to keep exchanging data exhaust for time saved.

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