Google today unveiled predictive web browsing in Chrome. A preview version of the browser can now communicate with Google’s servers that foresee content published on the web up to three weeks in advance. Google considers this feature a revolutionary step in the browser speed race and said that it wants to settle claims of the world’s fastest web browser once and for all.
Time travel has been a quest of humankind for centuries. It’s not just movies such as Back to the Future that sparked interest in this fascinating topic: History’s greatest minds have explored the concept of bending time and freely moving between the past, the present and future. Traditional research has arrived at a point where time travel to the future is considered theoretically possible, but it is unknown whether one could travel back in time. Those concepts are, however, based on the idea of physical time travel. Google has taken a different approach: It applies a gravitational time dilation data mining process to stored user data, which enables the company to accurately forecast content that will actually be published sometime in the future. In effect, users will be able to consume content before it is created.
The data crunching happens in a massive 8 million square-foot data center the company quietly built in the middle of nowhere near Casper, Wyoming. It is a supercomputing facility that apparently exceeds the performance capability of the currently leading supercomputer on the top 500 list by a factor of more than 100 and is solely used for time data processing. The service is currently being prepared for rollout in 2011 and has passed Google’s alpha testing within a group of 50,000 users in the U.S. All alpha testers were given Chrome OS computers and agreed to give Google full access to all data on their computers. In exchange, those users received an exclusive first look at an experimental version of Chrome called Chrome Pre. Google told ConceivablyTech that it will quickly extend the capacity of its service and make it available to millions of people by the end of the year.
“We successfully tested Chrome Pre within the Google Plex and found that the predictions being made were about 98% accurate within a time frame of about three weeks,” said Heinrich Zukunft, product manager of Chrome Pre. “With predictive browsing, it is now clear that there is no browser that can be faster than Chrome. We are confident that predictive browsing works even better on a larger scale as we are accessing more data about many more lives that enable us to forecast events even further in the future.”
Google says that it currently collects about 220 TB of private data from its current Chrome Pre evaluators on a daily basis. Zukunft noted that the data is safely stored in Wyoming as well as a warehouse in a remote location in Zimbabwe. He stressed that the data is used only for forecasting purposes at this time, but the company reserves the right to reuse the information in any other future Google application.
Zukunft conceded that there are privacy concerns, especially when people are accessing data about the future of the personal lives of others. “It can be pretty messy. We had predictions of cheating spouses. We had bankruptcies. But you can opt-out of the predictions similar to a do-not-call list. All predictions were accurate, by the way.” However, according to Google, the service has more benefits for users than disadvantages.
“You really have to see the upside,” Zukunft said. “Giving up your private life is a small price to pay, if you are getting a front row seat to viewing the future. Imagine, you could pre-order a new iPad three weeks or even further in advance from its initial announcement. You could stream a movie from Netflix that hasn’t been released yet, you could read the true weather report for next week, you could even predict lottery numbers, which would be, of course, illegal. Pre is also much more accurate in predicting the outcome of sports events or elections than what we have been doing for some time already.”
Chrome Pre does not differ from the regular Chrome with two main exceptions. Content pages are now shown with a time stamp and there is a Browsing Future next to the Browsing History.
Google’s motivation to offer such a feature is largely based on the experience it has made with Instant Search. Instant Search had a dramatic impact on AdSense revenues. “We are now going beyond Instant,” said Google co-founder Larry Page in a conference call with the press. “With Pre, we are able to offer our AdSense customers an opportunity to leverage revenue on events and products they are not yet aware of. In fact, most of your ad revenue may come from products and services you have never heard of, because they don’t exist yet. Similarly, advertisers have to trust us to set a budget for their advertising campaigns as we can now predict how an ad can fit into future content.”
Page said that the prediction time frame will depend on the hardware horsepower of a client PC, as Google will be shifting data for personal analysis to a consumer PC. “Future prediction is a massive task and some work has to be done by a client PC network,” explained Zukunft. There will be premium services that will allow a more detailed forecast of data than the data that will be provided through a free service. An average PC, for example, should be good enough to give users a 3-week view into the future, while a smartphone can only deliver about 5 days. A high-end machine that is tied to Google’s data center and has access to the full data set may be able to see about 6 months into the future, in near real time.
Not everyone is as excited as Page about Chrome Pre. Market researchers voiced their concerns over the service that will erode at least a portion of their business. The RIAA complained that illegal music downloading may get out of control as artists and publishers would not really know what to protect. Lawmakers are questioning the legality of such a service and its potential implications on crime, while they said they welcome the opportunity to work with Google on a Minority Report-style crime prevention program. Google said that it is not concerned about any upcoming problems as it can accurately predict possible issues and act accordingly in advance.
Page described Google Pre a win for mankind, but as a loss for Microsoft. “Sergey and I are in a competition who would come up with an idea that could put Microsoft out of business. Sergey has better ideas about annoying Apple, but Chrome Pre was my idea. I can tell you that Microsoft’s Bing will be toast in less than six months and that AOL will acquire the service before the summer is over. Since we are extending this service across our platforms, and, by default, we have the advantage of predicting the future, I think it is pretty safe to say that we can take Microsoft apart, piece by piece, at our discretion. The future looks pretty exciting to me.”
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