  My name is
Doug Coupland and
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00:00:11,490 --> 00:00:11,090
I
  am Artist-In-Residence to Google
Cultural Institute in Paris
and it's a great gig
let me tell you. I'm loving
it.
  What I'd like to do right now is
let's go back in time to
the year 1995
  and
  I come back in a time travel
machine from now and I say
'You know what, in twenty years from
now, you're going to be able to
ask any question you want anywhere
on Earth and in one tenth of a second
you're going to get the answer.' And
you'd go like, 'Wow, no, that's not
possible. Surely not.' And
yet, here we are, twenty years later
and we all live with this
every day of our life, and it's kind
of weird how blasé we are
about Search and how it's just
become another part of our
life.
  One of the weird
textures of living in
2015 is that
we've never actually been smarter
but we've never felt stupider
and that's why I invented the word
'smupid'.
  I actually think the collective
human IQ has been rising
generally over the last twenty years
so that by 1995
standards, the current average
IQ is about 103
but of course we all feel like it's
97,
  and there's this other corollary word
with 'smupid', it's called 'Stuart'
'Stuart' means
'I'm really smart, I just
don't have Wi-Fi access
at the moment.'
  I remember life before
Google. I remember always driving
in a car, driving to the library
going to the reference section, trying
to find something really minor
like a phone number in another
time zone or area code
  I remember being at dinner parties
and there's always some blow-hard propagating
an urban legend at the table and
you're like, 'Dang, that is so not true,'
but you have no way to prove it. I think
if nothing else, Google has killed
the urban legend.
  I go to Google about
twenty times a day. I think most
of us do. It's just part of our life
now, like brushing our teeth or combing
our hair.
  You know, I've gone on Street View
I've looked at my house from outer space
I've stalked a few people I used
to know years ago.
  Before I go to a dinner party
I always Google everyone that's going
to be there. That used to feel
kind of stalky and
now it's just what you do. People
actually kind of get annoyed
if you didn't Google them beforehand
  Why am I
here, this morning? Well
  it's this. We're going to ask, what is the
most important question of
our time? I know the answer
and the answer is this
  Just kidding.
  The question is, 'What are
we actually searching for?'
  We're here to talk about this book
It's called Search
It weighs a lot.
  You should all have a copy. If
you came to Zeitgeist using
carry-on luggage only, I
apologise.
  The
  book is one of a few projects
we're doing at the Cultural Institute
  The book came about because most
people
  really are curious about, what
are people searching for? What are they
looking for?
  We are hunter gatherers
Looking for answers to questions
is part of our DNA. So
what I suggested was, 'Okay
within the constricts
of your data system
  what can we do to allow
us to look for search patterns?'
I came up with the idea of choosing
1,000 words and
  offering them to the Search people
and then they would come back
with
  the answers to what people had been searching
for but,
  before they came to me, they
had to go through SafeSearch, then
staff had to go through them to remove
anything that your child might
find weird and
  we did this search. It was the month
of February this year. Globally
God knows how many billions of searches
all English language, and
  well, we've got Search, the book
and to my mind, it is
the closest you can come to being
on the internet while actually
reading what is technically a book
  Also, one factor, no
search is included that wasn't
repeated at least 50 times
in a single day.
  This is just an in-house rule, it
makes for better data.
  Anyhow, the results were ranked from
the top to the
bottom. The top 100
  Before I show you a few things
this is Marshall McLuhan. He is a
media guru. I wrote
a biography of him a few years
back and he
had this theory that to
survive in the maelstrom
he called it, he was very prescient
he saw the Internet 50 years before
it happened,
  the way that you stay sane
the way you stay cogent is to
look for patterns
  You may not find them but the act
of searching for patterns is
what's going to keep you sane
I have
  this weird thing,
  I enjoy talking in public
but my mouth goes dry. I don't
know what that's about, the only other time
I get it is when I'm going through customs
at an airport.
  So maybe it feels like I'm trying to be
fraudulent in some way. So
let's have a look at a few things
that I have learned from searching
and Search.
  Where would the Internet be without celebrities
There's God knows how much stuff
out there. One of the words I
chose was 'wife'
a very fundamental word.
  So we put that in the search and
what came back-,
  so I think basically, as
human beings, we're always looking at
celebrities and wondering, 'Did
they marry out of their league?'
  Then, so you put in the word husband
  and then of course you get the other way around
  Now, the Internet. Dr
Internet.
  The Internet is the doctor
for billions of people.
  You take a word like 'symptom', you put
it in, and you can see pretty
much what's going on in
all the bodies on Planet
Earth.
  A lot of women's health, that's
a very large category online
  It's almost, you can look at
  the questions from 1 to 100
and you can see the things that people get
the most. I think canker sores
weirdly, is one thing people
get most.
  Cul-de-sacs. A cul-de-sac
is a dead end road.
  Take a word like this one. 'Tasteless'
What might come in if you put the word 'tasteless'
into the search engine?
  What you get is this. I
think it's like twelve answers
  and then you get nothing.
  I think the reason for that
is, is because people just
don't use the word 'tasteless' to search
very much. It's that simple
  Also, probably the results
that came in were under 49
single entries per
215
00:08:08,450 --> 00:08:08,080
word.
  Rural words. My dad
has a farm in Canada, so
I put in what I thought was a very
219
00:08:18,090 --> 00:08:18,050
very
  rural word
  and, even though this was
done in English language, I
somehow entered the Korean
time-space continuum
here.
  Now, another word, I call
them IKEA words. Usually
they're indefinite pronouns
like 'dahe' which is also
'die' in German, 'die
  zeit'. 'Fad', okay, you put in the
word 'fad'. What's the latest
fad the kids are up to?
  And you immediately find out that
fad is actually a word in Norwegian
or Swedish.
  You take another at 'hint'. I don't
know, people are maybe looking for hints
and are playing a video game which is
a huge category.
  Instead,
  I think this is Turkish.
  I think, it's like dance music
in Turkish.
  What is it? It's Indian
Thank you, you've solved the mystery
This is the power of crowdsourcing
in action. Okay.
  Here, what do the following searches
have in common?
  Can you read that okay?
  What they have in common
is that
  people around the world use
the Internet to do their
homework.
  Quite often, you'll look through a category
and you'll get like,
  A squared plus B squared
is or is not equal to whatever
and you're like, 'That's a really weird question.'
  Sometimes, depending on how popular
the textbook is, people just put
the whole thing in verbatim, so it really
skews.
  Okay, this is one thing.
  Sometimes, it can really surprise
you.
  So we put this in, and the
answer to this is
  man boobs. The Internet has a
seemingly unslakeable
thirst for information on
what man boobs are, how to get
rid of them, why do we have
them?
  We're learning about ourselves online
here. 'Recency'. This is a category
that is very important to Search
The month of February, the biggest
words that month were
50 Shades of Grey
Valentine's Day and
the Super Bowl.
  When going through the results
we had to actually remove-
50 Shades of Grey, we would pull
it all out and leave the top reference
just to show that it was 'top dog' that
month or what have you. Then you get
things like-, okay, a word
like 'rigged'. I was very curious
to see how people think what
might be rigged in the world and
this is what came up.
  It was like, 'Oh, okay.'
  This is the power of recency
This is just the power of how the
news can completely obliterate
a category overnight.
  'Random'. There is some really random
stuff out there.
  Here's the word 'school' and
you plug that in and you get this,
  and
  how the hell did that happen? What
it is, sometimes things like this just
slip through the gate. It's got the bots
or crawlers that go through the system
and you just spew
these things out. Sometimes it's
so interesting that you just keep them
because they tell us something
weird about ourselves. I'm not quite sure
what.
  Okay. So,
  sometimes you have words that
are slightly problematic
  Hang on, I thought that would get more of a laugh
  You take a word that's possibly
offensive on its own and
you plug it in
  and it ends up being really funny
shit as you can see up
here.
  It's weird doing something like this because you
kind of mentally guesstimate how
fast the audience is reading
and if you go too quickly it means
you're like disrespecting their intelligence
or you're-, anyhow-,
  let's go to the next slide.
  This is called a 'Branding Warp'. This
is another pattern I noticed
is that if you take a word, in
this case it's the word 'theft'
and you plug it into the system
what are you going to find? What you find
  is that Grand Theft
Auto completely ate up the entire
'theft' category. Sometimes
with 'secret', Victoria's Secret
products ate up the word 'secret'
It just kind of happens sometimes
Now let's go-,
  this is interesting. Sometimes
one event or word
can just eat up a category in a very
unusual way. I'm going to show you
this. This is the word 'air'
  I'll let you read these here
  What this is, is
the brother of Paris Hilton was
on a flight from A to B to C
or what have you, got very, very drunk
then walked through the plane calling everyone
peasants and said
'My dad's really rich and is going to buy
my way out of this.'
  So, what happens is that people
send this story like crazy
to all their friends and this ends
up in the search category. It's like
karmic payback for the young
Hilton there I think.
  Now, another surprise for people
you go from 'air' to 'hair'
and what can be more fundamental
And so you put in the word and
what comes out is
  hair extensions, style, blah
blah blah, and you think, 'Oh well, we're
a vain species, aren't we?'
and then suddenly,
  'Oh.' This is actually a very common question
that appears over and over
and I was almost moved by
this when I saw it.
  'Is Google an oracle?'
  Some people treat it that way
Some people actually look at Google
as sort of an omniscient entity and
they ask it questions
  in the form of a question.
  Here for example, you can see these
This is my favourite one of all, 'How long
is a 5k?'
  Subtle,
  but,
  we're all people, we all know
what it's like to be at your laptop
or computer going through this kind
of mood we're seeing right here
  What happens is people put in this
kind of question.
  They don't just put them in a few times
These questions, there's like hundreds
of thousands of times these questions
come through. You realise that someone
is at a keyboard somewhere actually
typing this in, and they had to be going
through this to make them ask this question
and I think that's sort of a wonderful
  inspiring thing.
  What do we learn from all this? Well, people
are
  way smarter than you think and
I think we're entering this era where intelligence
is marked, not only by the questions
you ask but how you search for those
questions. I think as an education
  a new course instead of social
studies might be searching studies
How do you get what you want when you needed
it? People are really
always looking for pizza. There is
so much pizza on the Internet, you
wouldn't believe it. It's just everywhere
'How do I get pizza? Where do I find it
Where's the nearest pizza place?'
Another thing that defines us as humans
is that we're always trying to get
more sleep. Insomnia
is a huge category.
  Snoring. Anything to do with
even getting one more minute of sleep
is massive.
  People are also, I
think Omid touched on that before
they're always looking for meaning, they're
always looking for something larger than
ourselves,
  and people
  are always surprising
and
  those are the first capital letters
you'll see in the entire presentation
Search is always done in lower
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00:16:38,200 --> 00:16:38,090
case only.
  Read the book, give it a look. It's
great. As I say, you dive right
in and you come back out
and it feels like you're in a three hour
warp, looking for kitten videos
or something. It's a very similar
psychic dynamic.
  I would like to thank Google for having
me here today and for giving me
such a great gig at the Cultural
Institute in Paris.
  Thank you very much, it's been a pleasure to be
  here.
