Life just got better. At the end of last week, Google announced that its personalised search had now become available to ‘signed-out’ users.
What does that mean?
Well, personalised search means that Google uses its history of what you have searched for before to provide more relevant results for subsequent search queries. It records everything you’ve searched for and every result you’ve clicked. This allows it to profile you and produce results that are more likely to be about what you’re interested in. If you live in Birmingham, UK, for example, and often click on results for places in that city, then you’ll be less likely to get results relating to Birmingham, Alabama.
Signed-out users are people who don’t log into a Google account prior to conducting a search. That would include people who haven’t opted in to have their search results saved. This is done through a cookie file saved on your computer. Unless your Internet privacy settings are set very high, this will happen without you noticing.
So, whoever you are, your search history is saved and analysed. Without your permission.
In a similar vein, the rollout of real-time search means that Twitter comments are instantly catalogued. And don’t worry – you don’t need to change any account settings or opt-in to anything. They’re doing it anyway. There really is no ‘undo’ button on the web.
Any lily-livered liberals clinging to outmoded ideas like a right to privacy need to move on. As Google CEO Eric Schmidt told CNBC last week:
If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.
Well, maybe I shouldn’t. Or maybe I just don’t think it’s any of your business. Or that you should ask me first.
Oh wait – you are allowed to delete your history and opt out. But you’ll need to explicitly opt-out of survei personalisation on every computer you use.
I really wish Bing produced better results.
Postscript: I notice Alan beat me to the punch on this and is typically incisive.
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December 8th, 2009 → 2:56 pm @ Ian Delaney
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