Google answered part of your question about personalized search in some correspondence with the Mercury News that we posted as part of a recent project on Web privacy. The short answer is yes, people can edit and delete their own view of their own searches, however, Google will continue to retain a copy in its logs.
People who are interested in this topic are welcome to review our correspondence with Google and the other the top three Internet companies (search engine/portals). We sent long lists of questions about data collection and retention to Google, Microsoft and Yahoo and conducted a combination of phone interview and written follow-up with AOL. The best way to find our project is by typing my name, the names of the companies and “privacy” into one of the major search engines. The companies didn’t answer as many questions as I would have liked. However, I think there is a possibility they will be more forthcoming once they realize how important this issue is to the hundreds of millions of people who use their services every day.

Best regards,

Elise Ackerman
Reporter
San Jose Mercury News

Sure it is. But this way since I am making the advertisement on the internet more valuable than I do want the benefit of my profile in terms of lower advertisement rate for advertisers and therefore lower prices for me. Instead of a web company making increased profits by being able to raise advertisement rates and not letting me have the fruits of my own profile.

It would be very difficult for them to convince Advertisers to maintain their relationships, if there is not high quality relevance and correlation with prospective buyers.
(Gone are the days of only the one-size-fits-all animated Gifs banners, and pop-ups)

Many of these services are being paid for indirectly by the dollars generated from Advertisers. If might defeat the purpose to NOT ultilize and analyze tenaciously.

By being PROACTIVE users can delete Google cookies or use proxies or dynamic IPs, and not use any of the log-in-required free services offered by Google (GYM).

But other perspectives are:

– wouldn’t it also be to your advantage to get the most RELEVANT ads pushed to you as opposed to generic ads?

– if your were an Advertiser, wouldn’t YOU want the most likely prospects for your hard earned dollar$?

Not if it is against the DMCA they don’t have that right!

But look, let’s turn it around: Suppose I were to do the same thing to Google as they are doing to me: Take all the results pages that they returned to me, and profile them, record them, etc. Let’s go one step further: Implement a firefox plugin that lets -everyone- in the world profile and record the Google results. Then, we all just aggregate the results (anonymously!), and create our own, community-based, peer2peer search engine, serving Google results.. but without the ads! It would be just like filesharing.. except instead of sharing files we’d be sharing Google rankings.

Don’t you see the beautiful symmetry in this? Google mines the data from millions of users. So why can’t millions of users mine data from Google?

And it wouldn’t even be against Google’s TOS, as Google says no automated queries are allowed. None of these queries would be automated. They would all be real queries. We would just have millions of users aggregating them…which would have the same effect of automation, without actually being so.

But I can still see Google saying: “Wait, hold on! Those ranked results are still OUR intellectual property. They don’t belong to you, just because you issued the query that created the ranked list.”

Well, what’s the difference? Why does Google get to claim property on its actions, and I can’t on mine?

What you buy in retail is also less personal that indicators of “what you are thinking” the way search strings are. It’s intensely more personal and capable of violating more real privacy.

Additionally, the participants in this market are acting aloof and removed, which is what is causing the quiet groundswell. They don’t want to crack the door open and give consumers control over recordings of their personal lives because advertisers will view it as invaluable.

I think you have a point (albeit delivered without much class) regarding consumer behavior being able to trump this. However, the volume of the issue has nowhere near reached a point of incline where it will count. Yet.

It just ain’t that simple, and STFU represents the kind of infitile behavior that does little to contribute to meaningful conversation. QTFD.

2. If you go into your local store, the very useful ones just around the corner of your street. Can you prevent (or legally force) the store owner from recognizing and greeting you in person. Can you prevent them from suggesting things that were not available to you before but are in stock now. If you were paranoid about such things, you will simply go to a superstore like Walmart or a Tesco, and not be bothered by the convenience that such local small-stores can offer.

Increasingly I see people, like John Battelle and his kind, treat Google as if it were a tax paid, subsidized, government sponsored, free-lunch, public service, which in this year, decade or century it is absolutely not. If such people were bothered about the privacy of interactions with Google, then it would simply be best to go to a random Internet cafe and use any Internet search services engine there. Or lobby their Government to sponsor a public service utlity for Internet searches (shudder … (think of NSA) … shudder again …)

Google (or Yahoo, MSN whatever …) have every right to use their data, which includes user interactions, profiles, history, preferences, for anything or even sell it (currently in the form of targeted Ads to Sponsors). Their behaviour will change the user perspective’s towards them. For instance if they sell (or forward) my e-mail address to Sponsors (or even stores, like Paypal or Amazon currently does), then I will stop using such services they offer (or setup a fake email address, where such spam can be directed to)

If you are not happy about this reality then don’t use these sites, or as a saying goes STFU …

Example: I have been really getting into seo for a while now. I am a complete novice that is currently sandboxed due to a really stupid rookie mistake. Well one of the things I have been doing is working to optimize our small web store. By reading different things on SEO I have been looking into keyword stuffing and wondering where the line is between optimization and stuffing. So, wanting to get out and stay out of the sandbox I decided to try to do some research. I decided to go to google and type in : ”keyword stuffing in title seo” The site that popped up was seoblackhat.com/category/keyword-stuffing/
Not reading the url I just opened the link and started reading. A somewhat funny feeling hit me that big brother was watching. My thought was “Google knows I just visited this site, and they know who I am because I log into my g-mail, sitemaps, and adwords account.”

I don’t think google is looking for those patterns yet, but I could see them in the future trying to track patterns of site owners and apply that to their algorithm. Especialy if a site owner is hanging out on black-hat sites all day.

Let’s pretend for a bit ONE of the GYM decides to make our profile editable (my money’s on G). What kind of a competitive advantage does this REALLY create for them? LOTS of goodwill at the influencer level to be sure. For instance, Mr. Battelle, I know you’d be cheering on the next version of editable profiles and chiding the laggards. But, what does it mean for the longer tail of users (grandma and the non-geek next door at the office)? It means squat! These are likely the same people who don’t use advanced search features you note in your book. They probably also won’t care until something foul happens in conjunction with such a profile (an icon falls for illegal behavior as recorded in their searches and click throughs). As soon as it affects the popular culture… THEN it will matter. For all of about two days. Then it’s back to the throw away silliness of the world.

It’s just one more feature, like pivot tables in Excel, most people will never use but taken in aggregate add up to be the unique, secret sauce of a REAL offering.