The future of search is the future

Wired magazine reports that Google and the CIA have both recently invested in the web technology company Recorded Future. "The world's first Temporal Analytics Engine . . . that allows you to visualize the future, past or present."

Recorded Future examines public web pages, blogs, and social networking sites and extracts the people, places and the activities they mention.

• Who is involved - identity analysis..
• The type of event - activity analysis.
• Location of the event - spatial analysis.
• The time of the event, past or future - temporal analysis.
• Attitude toward the event - sentiment analysis.

Recorded Future then seeks to discover the connections between the players, the locations, and the event.  When the even is oriented in future time, the process is predictive. Recorded Future also has a blog.

For Google, any significant progress toward perfecting this collection of analytical techniques could go a long way toward accurately classifying the large amounts of unstructured data on the web, and produce more relevant and timely search results.

Unlike many ventures invested in by the C.I.A., Recorded Future is not a big secret totally hidden from view. Recorded Future is live on the web, offering its analytical services for a monthly fee, or a striped down version for free.  The free version (my choice) offers daily or weekly alerts to the following topics:

• Financial markets
• Geopolitical
• Industry analysis
• Public figures
• Technology sector
• Myself or my company

Tracking and predicting the movement of public figures will be a boon to the paparazzi, no doubt, but tracking myself on the web through Recorded Future is almost irresistible.  That's the one I'm signing up for, even though I know the information I willingly provide will be used by Recorded Future to build its identity database.  As an internet marketer I'm fairly committed to being known, identifiable, and findable.

Tom Fox
Louisville, Kentucky
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