tedster - 5:52 pm on Oct 28, 2010 (gmt 0)

That's me. I look at an awful lot of data, but on self-reflection I find that after doing that, I tend to "go with my gut" -- some high-level abstraction of what I "feel" I'm seeing.

Me too - if I'm drop-dead honest, that's often how I use data. There's just so much time and there are always unforeseeable consequences from any change, no matter what. So I look at the data, make a relatively informed gut decision. Sometimes I just "shoot from the hip."

But that's not the Google mindset at all, and that's why this thread is so important. Google is a profoundly data driven organization. They have found ways to test and measure factors I would never have dreamed could be quantified.