Explain to me like I’m 5
In: Technology
So Data is simply knowing quantifiable stuff about an observed event.
Simple data might be “how tall something is” or “at what time did someone go to sleep”.
Big Data is when we start looking at how all the little data start interacting with each other, let’s think specifically in terms of internet usage, for example.
So we start not only collecting information about what websites a user is visiting, but more detailed scenarios like “70% of the time after visiting amazon.com users between the ages of 18 and 34 are performing google searches for the same thing they just shopped for, and clicking on the first 3 search results”.
That’s not only capturing the small data of “user went to amazon” “user is 27 yrs old” “user searched amazon for X” “user visited Google” “user searched google for X”… etc., but also capturing the whole story that those individual data points tell us, and analyzing it over a large sample set and time span.
That sort of Big Data, and the subsequent analysis of said data “Data Analytics” allows marketing companies to determine how best to target advertisements to get the biggest result.
If I know the scenario above, I might want to embed my ads for products on amazon within sites with high Search Engine Optimization, knowing that they’re going to appear in those top 3 results, and therefore get more coverage for the same money spent on the ads. Subsequently, businesses will want their own sites to appear within those top 3 results, and work to improve their own SEO.
This is just one example of how Big Data works (it’s not just confined to internet usage; pharmaceutical data, medical data, sociological impact data, these are all fields that can benefit from this sort of large scale correlation analysis), but I think it helps illustrate the difference between simply gathering specific data, and the analysis of what’s been coined as “Big Data”.
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