Quantitative sociological research in the IT-industry: Google Experience
Highlights of Georgy Kosinets’s lecture at the HSE Sociology Department
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Georgy Kosinets (quantitative user experience researcher at Google, CA) delivered a lecture at the HSE Department of Sociology on October, 1st. Stas Moiseev, a research assistant at the LCSR, attended the event. He summarized most interesting aspects of Kosinets’ talk for the Lab website!
Georgy shared out his practical knowledge and presented some results of Google's studies based on analysis of search queries. I was intrigued by a comparison of leisure preferences between people in the USA and the United Kingdom: during the summer British people are primarily interested in “squash”, “pubs” and “horses”, while the Americans are searching for “paintball”, “rides” and “ice cream”.
Emerging research in the field shows that huge data sets gained from different Google services give wide opportunities for statistical analysis, modeling of social processes, and prediction of future events. For instance, now Google might predict epidemics from rise of search queries for medicines (a month before the spread of the disease their number reaches a maximum).
Finally, Georgy said that in his work he often uses help of academic scientists, for example, in case of important methodological problems. His lecture was an interesting opportunity for academic scholars to share experiences with the researcher, who works for a large company in the IT-industry.
by Stas Moiseev