You tell Google things you might not even tell your spouse, but how much does it really know about you?
Google is everywhere. If you've been on the internet at all in the past 17 years, you know this. For many of the web's savviest users, Google products serve as their primary search engine, browser, email client, document editor, map service, online video portal, and smartphone operating system. Collectively, we've offered up so many inputs that it can now finish our sentences for us, much like a soulmate or spouse.
Every day we're sharing more with Google — often times confessing our darkest secrets and most guarded desires into the keyword bar, and yet, most of us have no idea what Google really knows about our lives. Since most of our inputs into Google are in service of its massive advertising business (this is how it makes $39 billion dollars from us every year), we decided to devise a little game.
We asked BuzzFeed staffers to think about three of their most telling/important general interests (eg: "Football" "Rap Music" "Cats" "Coffee" "Pokemon") and to write them down. Then we asked them to explore their Google Ads profile to see what Google claims to know about them from their website histories and search results. The result is a creepy, dystopian version of the Newlywed Game. The Googlywed Game. Here's what we found:
