Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Today we're helping people get better search results by extending Personalized Search to signed-out users worldwide
That's a staggering statement meaning that every computer accessing Google is now being personalized, signed in or not, so any desktop, laptop or kiosk will start tracking everything everyone does and you won't be able to access the same search results from any two machines.
The possible impact to all is staggering.
You may be the only one, but you better start now, at least when the cookie is not disabled. Click tracking is now officially part of the algo, at least in part.
You may be the only one, but you better start now, at least when the cookie is not disabled. Click tracking is now officially part of the algo, at least in part.
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The creepy part of this cannot be ignored either, Google will follow you whether you want to or not. Maybe you need to watch your shoulder as you search if people realize that Google shows your previously visited sites first :)
I don't see this Google announcement as creating a new privacy issue. The privacy issues involved are far from unique to Google, at any rate.
The privacy issue is massive and unique to Google, JUST BECAUSE Google has their property spread all over the place, sometimes disguised as other brands and sometimes unknown to the user. Youtube, Blogger, Feedburner? Adsense, Analytics, Maps? ONLY Google is currently able to follow a browsers steps almost entirely as he moves from site to site. One site shows a Google Map. The next site uses Analytics. And the site visited after that uses Adsense. And then he visits a site with a Youtube video on. Then the user goes back to Google search to conduct another search and arrives at a Blogger page.
The folks in Redmond can not do that. They simply have not got the reach. Even if they collect user data (they certainly do), they can not track you throughout the web.
All this data gives a perfect behaviour profile (on the web), and we all have to pray that this massive data collection does not get into the wrong hands. THAT is the real privacy issue here.
Implications from that? I am now going to guessing mode: if you are a webmaster who does not use Goo products at all, i.e. not allowing the Gorg to track your visitors throughout your sites, then you will lose your organic rankings over time. See, that's the beauty of it! They start slowly to excert their power over you, trying to control your behaviour and your thoughts.
- Do you really want to publish that blog post on your site that criticizes Google? Really? What if Google finds out? One push of a button at the Plex, and you are gone from the SERPs.
- Do you really want to publish that forum post on (insert popular webmaster forum here) where the forum operator uses Analytics to see what happens? Really? What if Google finds out and instantly knows who you are? One push of a button at the Plex, and you are gone from the SERPs.
- Do you really pull all your Adsense ads from your pages? What if Google liked your sites because of Adsense being present?
See how subtle Google has already influenced our way of thinking (as webmasters)? It's all about FEAR. FEAR to lose rankings. FEAR to lose business. FEAR to become invisible.
FEAR is very Googley.
We as webmasters have created a monster (really) that now is out of control. Entirely. Thousands of bright minds serve the Gorg in exchange for some money, willing to please it in the FEAR of losing their company perks. They come up with more creative ideas to track users and to further embed their overlord into the minds of the users. To the outside this is disguised as having "more attractive products for consumers". But we -as webmasters- know what this is all about: tracking, more ads, better ads, more money, more Google mindshare. A perpetuum mobile.
Looking at the discussion here, and WW is by far the best place to have such a discussion, we seem to be still uncertain how to get the ghost back into the bottle. Some even don't see the need for that.
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And I see one more issue in usability, again from a consumer perspective: you can not discuss SERPs with other people. Let's assume for a second, you found something on Goo, and you're writing an E-Mail to your friend in another city (doesn't even have to be another country). In the past, your friend would have been able to easily find the same stuff as you did. Now, his "personalized" search interferes with his search results, and he will not see the same SERPs. Probably not even results that are close to what you are seeing (as it was in the past). Looking at our logs, we receive a lot of traffic from links that get sent by E-Mail, so I know that people do forward links to their friends and family. Google is no exception here.
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So, what can we do? What should we do?
As signor_john pointed out, boycotts seem to not work, because of the FEAR of webmasters to lose their rankings. However, those who are fearless should ACT NOW and tell their visitors, friends, family, colleagues. Make it a public topic. Write blogs, tweets, articles. Film a video. Ask mainstream media to report about the risks using Google.
And remove Google property from your sites to block Google's tracking ability. Then put a logo on your site: "Google can not track you on this site" with an explanation of what this means and why you are doing this (and do explain that this statement is not true if the user is using Google toolbar, Chrome browser, Chrome OS, Android, or Google DNS).
Animal Farm. Or 1984? The choice is ours.
Sell toolbars and software that benefits users (e.g. free smilies pack or web games, get them to download and install it. Software then runs searches on Google for your site.
Companies then pay you $$$ to buy computing/cpu time, e.g. 1000 searches/clicks a day to your site for $100.
If you have 500k install base, you end up manipulating search results on 500k of those PCs, in effect you would be running your own little Google SERPs where the highest bidder gets to the top.
Google could easily cover themselves by simply having as part of their terms of use a statement which says that by virtue of you using this service you are deemed to have opted into our personalised search which records details of your search history in a browser cookie.
Cheers
Sid
Google will continue to return the best sites they can find to any search query else the shelf life of Google will be dramatically decreased, there are other options.
Is it a good idea to intentionally NOT return the best site according to Google in favor of the best site according to individual computers? No, it's not.
BIG MISTAKE ! Because the idea is unsound. How it SHOULD have been implemented is with a big-ol "don't show me this site again" button that searchers can push when they see crap THUS leaving them with a REAL personalized set of results over time.
This spying stuff is going too far, I share my computer with family members and we don't like the same things.
edit: I wonder if Google will help foot the bill in fighting all of the viruses that do nothing more than alter personalized results, how would the average Joe or granny even know? This would in turn reflect badly on Google and that's really not a good thing. Please Google, before it's too late, turn this off and let the end user tell you what they don't want to see... don't spy and guess!
