Launch of ‘Google Instant’ underscores privacy cost of ‘free’ search
Posted on | September 9, 2010 | 3 comments
Google Instant, the powerful new search engine mechanism launched Wednesday, is a vivid reminder of the hidden privacy cost of using popular online services.
Google Instant rapidly fires different search results pages at you as fast as you can type a few letters of your search query. Many of the results flashing by will have images. This is Google’s turbo-charged way to show off how it is able to almost psychically anticipate what you’re searching for.
Google can do this because it keeps close track of what users search for; it maintains massive data centers; and it has an army of brilliant software engineers. It’s on track this year to top the $26 billion in 2009 revenue it generated selling search ads.
The privacy implications remain to be examined. First, general public reaction to Google Instant must play out. The new mechanism may appeal to some, but very well could annoy many others.
Tom Demers, marketing director at search software firm WordStream, believes Google’s engineers may not have fully accounted for the fact that millions of Google users aren’t very technical and don’t have much patience for chasing down rabbit trails.
“I think this will be a complete usability disaster for them, mainly because it doesn’t seem to have good audience alignment,” says Demers. “I’d guess that the most receptive user to a change like this would be earlier adopters, and most tech-savvy people likely use Google more from a toolbar than from Google.com.
“Meanwhile, the demographic for those who use Google.com skews much older, and includes many folks who will probably be less receptive to an interruptive complication in the way they consume search results.”
Kevin Lee, CEO of search consultancy Didit, compares Google Instant to a manic companion who incessantly interrupts you as you’re trying to say something, never allowing you to finish a sentence. Google has set out to “influence what you’re seeing and distract you to view their recommendations,” says Lee. “You start to lose the individuality of what the searcher set out to look for, and you end up with search lemmings.”
A pattern of millions of Google users getting sidetracked into viewing sites more randomly could boost Google’s revenue; this would happen as more users click on a wider array of web pages carrying Google-controlled ads, says Lee.
Whether advertisers would generally benefit from such a pattern is doubtful, says Lee. By and large, advertisers much prefer paying for clicks generated by “somebody who actually intended to click to their site,” he says.
Precursor tech industry analyst Scott Cleland says Google Instant “creates a new big conflict-of-interest to push/advertise the search results that most benefit Google, i.e. Google-owned results, results of Google satellites that Google monetizes search for, or Google.”
Michael Hussey, CEO of people-search engine PeekYou, says Google appears to be trying very hard to differentiate Google from Bing, which is running a distant second in search market share, even after recently combining operations with Yahoo.
“This is meant to remind consumers who the real innovators are,” says Hussey. “It is a big move, breaking nearly 15 years of search-engine precedents. It alters the way people have grown accustomed to seeing search-engine results.”
Hussey shares Lee’s belief that Google Instant will “mean more exposure for their advertisers, leading to more clicks and higher revenue. ”
Vanessa Fox, Seattle-based author of Marketing In The Age Of Google, says the search giant, no doubt, took such considerations into account. “Google has been testing this for a while, and they must have had overall positive results to have rolled it out to everyone,” says Fox.
Fox notes that you can always disregard the results and images flashing by and plow through typing out your full, intended query. “Will that be annoying? For some people, sure,” she says. “But if Google can anticipate what most people are really searching for and start to show those results automatically, they probably will increase the quality of results for most people.”
Google could use a home run — or even a solid single. It has struck out on three high-profile launches this year. Response was lukewarm to the revamped user-interface it unveiled on May 5. Priority Indexing, a brand new Gmail filtering system, launched Aug. 30, has received poor reviews.
Meanwhile, last Friday Google agreed to pay $8.5 million to settle a privacy lawsuit stemming from the ill-conceived February launch of Google Buzz, the massive social network Google created overnight by automatically including Gmail users’ private contacts on public Buzz profiles. Proceeds from the settlement, less legal fees, is set to go to unspecified Internet privacy groups.
By Byron Acohido
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Here’s how I read this article:
“People you’ve never heard of from companies you’ve never heard of think multi-billion-dollar and envy-of-tech-firms-everywhere Google had a bad idea.”
Comment by Tom — 9/9/2010 @ 12:00 pm
Is it free???
Comment by Anonmyous — 11/12/2010 @ 6:48 am
Is it free??? Or how much does it cost???
Comment by Anonmyous — 11/12/2010 @ 6:50 am