This is big news, readers know how much I like the concept of search history, pioneered by A9 and others. I spoke to Marissa Mayer about this last night, and I asked her why Google was finally doing this. Her response: “It was overdue.”
I totally agree. I’m on deadline right now for the final manuscript of my book, but the site is here. Once you sign up, your search history will be integrated into every Google search you do. This is a major move for Google, and I’ll have an essay as to why later.
Let the deluge of privacy fearing loonies begin!
This is a very hairy space, Google’s ownership of the audience will be strengthened 100 fold in less then a month. They can now tie my behaviors across 3 computers, 2 permanent locations, 100’s of WiFi hotspots, and all back to my profile and Gmail account. They’ll be able to run more Mathoogle over my behavior and tell ME when I want to buy something, eat something, find something, and they’ll be more accurate then if I were to answer directly.
The value of the BI data warehouse they’re collecting is indeed priceless; what I wouldn’t give to play with that data for a year or two.
I would imagine we’ll soon see a behavioral targetting AdSense product brewing deep in the labs.
For what it’s worth, I just finished converting the Google Search History into an RSS feed, with interesting results. You can find more information here: http://ejohn.org/projects/ghistory/ It’s open source and available for public use.
I’m really excited by this service, I can’t wait to play with it some more.
Wow! It’s just like http://mysearch.yahoo.com which came out last year, only you can’t block sites, or categorize results, or export an RSS feed for them, or…
Why is this interesting again?
When my gmail login changed to “Google account” about a week ago I knew something was afoot.
Advertiser pressure for improved targeting could not be ignored, Yahoo & MSN have rich demographic profiles – google need to build your profile based on activity.
Whats interesting is how are the 3rd party bidding tools going to cover both types of approaches to user segmentation?
Hell how are the advertisers going to deal with it – more data please folks!!