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Using Google to Dissect Arab Revolutions

by Amar Toor on March 25, 2011 at 12:10 PM

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The revolutions across the Middle East may have ushered in a new era of U.S. intelligence-gathering -- one that could even include Google.

Gabriel Koehler-Derrick, an instructor at West Point, and Joshua Goldstein, from Princeton, recently used Google Trends to analyze the terms that Web users in Egypt searched at the height of the country's recent upheaval. "What we did was a comparison of search terms over time starting from the moment the Internet was plugged back in by the government of Egypt on Jan. 25, and moving forward for a period of about 30 days to see what we could find out," Koehlser-Derrick explained to NPR.

Searching in Arabic, he and Goldstein studied trends for terms like "Tunis" in order to gauge how closely people in Egypt were following the uprisings in Tunisia. They would then compare these statistics for those on traditionally dominant queries. "Typically, as I think you'd find in the United States, pop stars trump almost any search you can think of," Koehler-Derrick told NPR. "But the search for Tunis prior to the demonstrations that kicked off in late January were surprisingly high."

During the revolution in Egypt, some Americans feared that the Muslim Brotherhood would rise to fill the vacuum left by ousted President Hosni Mubarak. Data from Google Trends, however, suggested that the Muslim Brotherhood wasn't gaining much traction online. Lt. Col. Reid Sawyer, an Army intelligence officer, thinks this kind of insight could have drastically altered political discourse at the time.

"If the decision makers could have understood how little the Muslim Brotherhood was animating the online searches inside of Egypt," Sawyer said, "How it might have led [sic] to different decisions or different discussions, at least, that were being held in the halls of Washington?"

And, while Google may not be able to predict every political uprising before it happens, analysts say it could add a potentially valuable dimension to the intelligence-gathering process. "The traditional intelligence community is absolutely biased toward classified information," Sawyer added. "I think that open source provides a critical lens into understanding the world around us in a much more dynamic way than traditional intelligence sources can provide."

Tags: egypt, google, GoogleTrends, intelligence, MiddleEast, MiddleEastProtests, opensource, politics, top, Tunisia, Web

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