OUR FREAKY FRIDAY: WEIRD OF THE DAY

FreakyFriday: Weird of the Day

A Twitter Feed for all Your Google Searches

by: iCopywriter Senior Editor, Heather Price-Wright

In this age of tech giants like Google and Facebook gobbling up our personal information like it was literal cookies, one app is encouraging that, rather than fight it, we actively participate in the over-sharing of our entire lives.

According to msnbc.com’s Technolog blog, the app, called OverShareMe, can be added to users’ Google Chrome browser as an extension. It then tracks users’ every Google search and broadcasts those search terms to Twitter, via the handle @PlzOverShareMe.

Luckily (or unluckily, depending on how much privacy you actually want to maintain), your searches aren’t announced via your own personal Twitter feed. Instead, when you install the Chrome extension, you choose a personal hashtag, which appears with your search terms on the app’s feed. For example, if we chose the tag #iCopywriter and searched for, say, “Why do people have two nostrils?” (I myself have, embarrassingly enough, Googled that exact phrase), the app’s Twitter handle would read:

@PlzOverShareMe: #iCopywriter Why do people have two nostrils?

One of the most interesting aspects of following the app’s Twitter feed is watching people refine their search terms or jump from search to search, and trying to imagine their thought processes while doing so. In the last few hours, for example, a user with the hashtag #prettyprettyprincess searched for “dr pepper 10 manhattan” and then, presumably because the results weren’t specific enough, “dr pepper 10 manhattan where to buy.” It seems this app, meant to be a cheeky addendum to Google, might actually give the search giant an extremely useful look into people’s search behavior and how they refine and change search terms to find exactly what they want.

The overall point of the app isn’t clear to us; is it a social experiment? A commentary on the culture of data mining and sharing the minutest, most banal details of our daily lives in which we exist? What is it trying to say about searches, about sharing, about privacy in modern life?

We were going to think about those big questions, but we got sidetracked Googling, and then tweeting that we were Googling, “What should I eat for lunch?”

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