This is a video made by Greg Jarboe, at Search Engine Strategies Chicago. Greg and the people he interviewed are some of favorite people in the industry. Now I am sorry I missed it. But its year end and not much travel budget left to play with. I did not miss the freezing cold though. I would like Google to bring me 5 minutes without a change. The past few weeks, with personalized search, site suggest and some caffeine thrown in have been hectic.
I always use Google they are the best search engine but what on earth are they doing with real time results and incorporating twitter into the results. I do not use Bing because I think their results are garbage and irrelevant most of the time so why does Google think they need to make this move. A search for Taylor Swift shows this rubbish in the middle of the results. Google I don’t care!!!…I want clean relevant results and the fact that somebody just tweeted that they learned a Taylor Swift song on their guitar. this is beyond irrelevant to me.
Who Cares
On Friday the 4th of December Google made what is probably the biggest change ever to its search engine. It affects every one of us who uses Google but Google did it without any notice or media attention. This post by Danny Sullivan explains it more clearly and eloquently than I could possibly ever do. Thanks Danny.
I find this very troubling, the reason I find it troubling is that most people will not even know that it is there. It is not like user personalization is new and for a long time if you were logged into a Google account, Google were tracking your history. Now though everybody’s search history is being tracked and it is an opt out not an opt in feature. Many people will not want this but will not even know its happening. I am not saying that it may not be helpful it may be to some people. Personally, I would never want customized search results as determined by Google and the absolutely most annoying thing about this is that I cannot opt out permanently. I can only opt out each time I search. I am trying to imagine if Faceook, MSN or Yahoo decided to do this and store everybody’s information wihtout telling them to then use it to demographically target them in the future, I am pretty sure they would not get away with it. Why can Google do this without giving notice. Why? because they are Google no other good reason they have the absolute power they can do what they want.
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