In the fierce war on Search Engines this can be a new page – for all of you out there who are wondering what war, hasn’t it been won by google I do believe it is not. Anyways, as the book “The Search” talks about how much can be known about you by Search Engine companies with your search behaviour/data. Accussing Google is doing this today and tracking everyone is rubbish, as it will take enormous processing power and no one has yet figured out a way to monetize that information for profit. But in the future this will become a possibility when computing power and data mining software become more sophisticated.
So online users worry about their privacy will become a genuine concern. I was happy to see a news today that Ask.com is planning to do something on this. They promise to protect your privacy by not storing information on your searches in their database with AskEraser (to be introduced by this year-end). If People like and flock to this feature, Google can implement the technology overnight – they have to stop doing their logging :-). But the challenge for Google is not Technology but business, because of the impact this will have on their advertisement business.
All said, privacy has every chance of becoming the next battle ground in search. It will be interesting to see any path-breaking innovation Google Engineers can come up with which protects Advt. revenue and privacy.
Till then, let us continue searching on the net as usual …