“This is going on your permanent record”
Major media outlets have started picking up Google’s news today that they’d be aggregating user profile and usage data across all of their products.
To be honest, I didn’t find this particularly surprising since I assumed Google had long been doing this.
But the winning quotation from the press release was this nugget:
Our recently launched personal search feature is a good example of the cool things Google can do when we combine information across products.
“Cool?”
Cool?!
Google “Search Plus Your World ™” was characterized in many ways when it shipped.
Of all The Web’s sentiment I saw, “cool” was not among it.
Unless you by “cool,” you mean “incredibly creepy, of limited actual use, and full of chilling effects.”
Does this change fall under “doing evil?”
I suppose it depends on how they end up using the data (and whether or not any independent entity could ever audit those statements to assert truth)… but however they use it, I’m pretty sure it will result in some pretty epic unintended consequences.
Just what is it Google is trying to accomplish?
Lots of things come into play besides accurate answers these days. I understand Google has recently announced they’re going to penalize content with a lot of ads at the top of the page. It may be that most of them are crap/scraped content sites that shouldn’t rank well anyway, but that doesn’t seem to be at issue. I think most people would be surprised at how many things besides accuracy go into Google’s results even before this.