First in the April Fools Day press release stakes, is Google

1 April 2008

Those wags at Google Australia are at it again this year. Apparently not only is the Big Brother of Google looking at where you’ve been, they’re reading, mashing and mapping everyone’s mind too. Enjoy…

Google writes:

Looking ahead: Google announces technology that searches tomorrow’s web, today

Google Australia today announced the launch of gDay, a new beta search technology that will search web pages 24 hours before they are created.

View the gDay page (link opens in new window) for more information, user testimonials and Q+A.

gDay was developed in Google’s Sydney engineering centre and can accurately predict future events and internet content. It does this by using machine learning and artificial intelligence techniques from a system called MATE (Machine Automated Temporal Extrapolation).

Using Google’s index of historic, cached web content and a mashup of numerous factors including recurrence plots and fuzzy measure analysis, gDay creates a sophisticated model of what the internet will look like 24 hours from now – including share price movements, sports results and news events. Plus, using language regression analysis, Google can even predict the actual wording of tomorrow’s blogs and newspaper columns.

Then, to rank these future webpages in order of relevance, gDay uses a statistical extrapolation of a page’s PageRank, called SageRank.

Only Australian websites are included in the beta.

“Google’s Australian engineers have a history of major technological innovations, from Google Maps to Mapplets to Traffic for Google Maps. Giving humankind the ability to see 24 hours into the future is just a natural progression – of sorts,” said Alan Noble, Head of Engineering for Google Australia & New Zealand.