Everyone reaches that point in their lives when, to make sense of it all, they embark on a road trip. Google is there and is preparing to tour the U.S. in a bus, but it'll be searching for the souls of others instead of its own.
Google is packing up a white van and is about to travel cross country to find out how people engage with its web products. It also wants to know how people react to new products it launches.
The van will make several stops each day as it leaves its starting point in New York and treks into seven states. It'll hit locations close to "colleges, libraries, parks and some of Google's own regional offices," according to an AP report.
"We are trying to understand the whole end-to-end experience, which is why we are trying to get out to more locations and see more people so we can gather more context," says Google's Laura Granka, a research lead that focus on Internet Search and Maps.
Google hopes to bring up to 500 people into the van, which is described as a scaled down and mobilized version of one of the company's labs. The sessions in the back seat of the van will last between 15 minutes and an hour and a half.
The van will stop in to Chapel Hill, N.C.; from March 14 to 18; Clemson, S.C.; from March 21 to 22; Atlanta, from March 23 to 25; Boulder, Colorado, from April 4 to 8; Salt Lake City, from April 11 to 15; Reno, Nevada, from April 18 to 20; and South Lake Tahoe, California, from April 21 to 22.
Google hasn't revealed any objective for this road trip beyond learning more about the people who use its products. The company's marketing department had zero involvement in conceptualizing the trip, according to Google's Granka, and it's not like the company is struggling in the popularity department.
A recent NBC/Wall Street Journal poll found out that, not only was Google more popular than Apple, the search engine has a higher approval rating than all of the current presidential candidates.
The two media outlets surveyed 1,200 registered voters, asking them if they had negative or positive feeling about several presidential hopefuls, past presidential candidates and two tech companies.
Google ranked first and was followed by Apple, John Kasich, Bernie Sanders, Barack Obama, Marco Rubio, Hillary Clinton, Ted Cruz, Mitt Romney and Donald Trump in that order.
