Given the rapid pace of change in the Middle East these days, it is becoming increasingly difficult to get a bead on what, exactly, the people behind the revolutions are thinking. We can look at new reports and interviews by journalists on the ground, but such endeavors are by default individualistic. Even if I interview 100 Egyptians about their opinions of the Muslim Brotherhood’s role in post-revolutionary Egypt, I am never going to get a complete picture. Opinion polls, which are a better gauge of public sentiment, are cumbersome, slow and expensive. So how best to understand, for example, who Egyptians are most likely to favor in the upcoming presidential elections? An article in the most recent issue of the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point’s monthly CTC Sentinel magazine attempts to answer that questioning by positing a novel analysis of Google Search terms. In “Using Google Insights to Assess Egypt’s Jasmine Revolution” writers Joshua Goldstein, a technology consultant and Ph.D. candidate at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School and Gabriel Koehler-Derrick, a West Point instructor and CTC associate, point out that
“Leaderless” revolutions, such as those in Egypt and Tunisia, are often particularly problematic because conventional tools of intelligence are of limited use: a satellite can estimate a crowd size, but it does not help to identify the ideas that will inspire and sustain protestors. Even high placed human intelligence sources may lack certainty as to who the political actors are that matter among the masses of demonstrators.
Their solution (or at least one of many) is to use an open source data analysis tool called Google Insights for Search which seems pretty obvious once you click in. They looked at three significant areas of interest: the role of religion in post-revolutionary Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood, and likely presidential candidates. In some cases, their results refuted popular Western conceptions—The findings from their study, they said, “cut against the characterization of the Brotherhood as a behemoth among a disorganized opposition and bolsters a far more cautionary tone on the group’s capacities and influence expressed by experts who have extensively studied the group.” Others simply provided novel insights: “[Arab League Chairman Amr]Moussa is clearly the opposition leader who people are most interested in and his search results lend support to reporting that he is currently a front- runner for the presidency.”
Their findings are interesting. Of even more value is yet another tool to better understand what people are thinking when they take to the streets—and their keyboards.