Search: How Bing, Facebook Will Predict Consumer Purchases
Summary
Google, Microsoft, Facebook and a slew of other companies continue to build algorithms that predict when, where and how consumers will make online purchases. The most recent technology comes from Intent Lab, a research unit of Performics and the Northwestern University Medill School of Journalism. The Intent Lab, which focuses on ways to better understand human behavior, created an Intent Scoring Algorithm that helps to explain the abstract thinking of consumers as they move closer to making a purchase, conducted by analyzing the words in search queries and the context around them. The system predicts household features like size and demographic composition based on profile photos, which is quite scary. “The online system applies one or more models trained using deep learning techniques to generate the predictions,” according to the patent.