{"id":107036,"date":"2020-05-13T19:05:15","date_gmt":"2020-05-14T02:05:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2020\/05\/our-weird-behavior-during-the-pandemic-is-messing-with-ai-models"},"modified":"2020-05-13T19:05:15","modified_gmt":"2020-05-14T02:05:15","slug":"our-weird-behavior-during-the-pandemic-is-messing-with-ai-models","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2020\/05\/our-weird-behavior-during-the-pandemic-is-messing-with-ai-models","title":{"rendered":"Our weird behavior during the pandemic is messing with AI models"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/our-weird-behavior-during-the-pandemic-is-messing-with-ai-models.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>In the week of April 12\u201318, the top 10 search terms on <a href=\"http:\/\/Amazon.com\">Amazon.com<\/a> were: toilet paper, face mask, hand sanitizer, paper towels, Lysol spray, Clorox wipes, mask, Lysol, masks for germ protection, and N95 mask. People weren\u2019t just searching, they were <a href=\"https:\/\/www.technologyreview.com\/2020\/02\/28\/916710\/how-to-prepare-for-the-coronavirus-covid19\/\">buying too <\/a>\u2014and in bulk. The majority of people looking for masks ended up buying the<a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Face-Mask-Pack-of-50\/dp\/B086KMYNSS?tag=lifeboatfound-20\"> new Amazon #1 Best Seller, \u201cFace Mask, Pack of 50\u201d<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>When covid-19 hit, we started buying things we\u2019d never bought before. The shift was sudden: the mainstays of Amazon\u2019s top ten\u2014phone cases, phone chargers, Lego\u2014were knocked off the charts in just a few days. Nozzle, a London-based consultancy specializing in algorithmic advertising for Amazon sellers, captured the rapid change in this simple graph.<\/p>\n<p>It took less than a week at the end of February for the top 10 Amazon search terms in multiple countries to fill up with products related to covid-19. You can track the spread of the pandemic by what we shopped for: the items peaked first in Italy, followed by Spain, France, Canada, and the US. The UK and Germany lag slightly behind. \u201cIt\u2019s an incredible transition in the space of five days,\u201d says Rael Cline, Nozzle\u2019s CEO. The ripple effects have been seen across retail supply chains.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In the week of April 12\u201318, the top 10 search terms on Amazon.com were: toilet paper, face mask, hand sanitizer, paper towels, Lysol spray, Clorox wipes, mask, Lysol, masks for germ protection, and N95 mask. People weren\u2019t just searching, they were buying too \u2014and in bulk. The majority of people looking for masks ended up [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":576,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,41,1512,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-107036","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biotech-medical","category-information-science","category-mobile-phones","category-robotics-ai"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/107036","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/576"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=107036"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/107036\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=107036"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=107036"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=107036"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}