In recent years there has always been some suspicion about Google collecting data from its users and their search queries. Now the company startet a series of videos explaining basic privacy concepts on YouTube. The announcement was made on the official Google blog.
This might be an answer to a recent poll conducted by Hakia which came out with the result, that 62 % of searchers don’t trust search engines. Of course Hakia is a search engine, too. But this engine does not place cookies on the user’s computer (without permission) and they are the very first to do so. From the beginning Hakia had a different approach to privacy matters but for quite some time obviously this was not noticed by searchers. So their poll can be seen as a marketing effort to promote that search engine.
And promotion is an important crucial thing to Hakia, as their search engine is still left far behind by competitors like Google or Yahoo concerning market share. As to search results Hakia’s semantic approach doesn’t seem to be behind Google. But not being behind isn’t enough in the search industry: As long as Google delivers satisfying results all those worries about their data mining don’t really matter. Otherwise searchers would switch as there are lot’s of alternatives.
So Google’s well made Video should be a good help to keep the No. 1 position in the search market. Or what do you think about it?
Alexandre Lucas, UK (rss)
Emmanuel Perez-Duarte, France (rss)
Fidji Simo, USA (rss)
Georgia Psyllidou, Greece (rss)
Jeremy Fain, France (rss)
Leonard Sellem, France (rss)
Lucien Huang, France (rss)
Matthias Schwenk, Germany (rss)
Raj Sheelvant, USA (rss)
Raphael Encaoua, Singapore (rss)
Remy Miralles, USA (rss)
Steve Danino, France (rss)
Vincent van Wylick, Netherlands (rss)
There’s several ways to look at this. One, yes privacy is important and protecting it is important to users
Another is that privacy is not important, to the extent that losing some of it is not perceived harmful. With the current trend of millions of blogs and 100s of personalisation services, I would gather that many net-users don’t care so much, as long as they don’t get harmed (though that certainly is happening and will likely get worse before it gets better).
A final take is as follows. By using stuff like cookies, search-engines can provide both a better service and more targeted adverts. The latter means that search-engines can collect more revenue, which leads to more cash for better code.
So, while I think Haiku’s approach is interesting, here are two reasons why I don’t think it’s great.
Instead, policies like “don’t be evil”, which may not be taken seriously by geeks and cynical business-peeps, do probably work quite well with the general masses. So, good publicity + cash + R&D is better than just good publicity. (Can you tell that I’m a capitalist?
Comment by Vincent van Wylick — August 9, 2007 @ 6:31 pm
Interesting point. Indeed Hakia will get problems with advertising when they can’t customize it.
Meanwhile Google is marching in the opposite direction with the new “iGoogle” service (personalized search).
Comment by Matthias Schwenk — August 9, 2007 @ 7:40 pm
If you mean the personalised home-page, igoogle.com, yes I’m a loyal user, even updating my twitter from it. Personalised search happens to every user who signs in, I think (and approves of it happening).
Comment by Vincent van Wylick — August 10, 2007 @ 8:43 am
I might try it, too! Sharing some data with Google must not necessarily be a (dangerous) risk, but a chance for better services, search results and other stuff to come in the near future.
Comment by Matthias Schwenk — August 10, 2007 @ 2:33 pm
[...] and business-aquaintances, together. And take something like iGoogle or search, which Matthias wrote about a short while ago, where both your search-results and widgets can easily be a mix between work and [...]
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