Love it or hate it, we’ve all seen it. Flash sites built for beauty and not spiders have often been the source of grief and stress within the SEO community as we try and explain why it was a dumb idea to do it that way. Ya, that’s harsh but so it trying to force a use to guess where they need to mouse over to find a menu.

I have a site I love to use as the perfect example of how flash lets you down. This chocolate company has some of the most yummy looking chocolate treats. Problem is, Google doesn’t think it has much to do with chocolate. Take a look at the Sweet Thoughts chocolate site which looks like this to Google and results in the Cadbury UK site along with many others to outrank it for a search for chocolate. In fact, the spidered flash is there but just not ranking. So the new spidering of flash content by Google should be a RankSaver for sites like this but I would caution everyone for the moment against complacency and encourage adoption of existing best practices.

From July 1st, Google started spidering the content of flash files to help to unlock some of the last places on the web left unlookedat. However, rather than looking normal, these sites are clearly marked with “[FLASH]” next to the search result. Yahoo! have had the technology made available to them as well but have not yet committed to a timeline to implement this enhanced spidering. Who knows what Live will do - maybe Ms. Dewey will simply take her crop and beat the offending sites in to HTML submission. Or run over them on her motorcycle. Mocking them might work as well

Google’s help files specifically state that “In general, search engines are text based. This means that in order to be crawled and indexed, your content needs to be in text format. This doesn’t mean that you can’t include images, Flash files, videos, and other rich media content on your site; it just means that any content you embed in these files should also be available in text format or it won’t be accessible to search engines”. So while this is changing for flash, I would still continue to create a mirror site for those with things like old browsers and flash turned off.

While being able to spider Flash content may seem like a solution to the issue of invisible content like the chocolate site above, it can present additional problems. Any flash currently loading via JavaScript will still be inaccessible since Google’s spider will not be having the ability to execute javascript added anytime soon if they tell the truth over in Mountain View. Recent personal experience leads me to believe they are sometimes painfully honest about some things so I’ll trust the news on this.

A lot of the Flash content has no text basis to it since it has been created out of images and possibly links. This spidering change will have no impact on the ranking of these sites until it combines image recognition with flash spidering. Sometimes, flash files are better left hidden but it may help with the ability of Googlebot to access and possibly rank deeper pages previously inaccessible.

Some flash content has multiple text-based ‘pages’ buried within the program. So lots of text, no context. If this causes one page to become authoritative for multiple keywords, it could cause issues with ranking. With the chocolate shop example, it could cause all items to be lumped on a single page, diluting a stronger authority if similar products were grouped logically together with unique textual content. So really, to catch chocolate lovers like myself that will want to include a different version of the content which breaks up text through a set of logical, focused pages to help Google rank each page for what it is authoritative for.

While duplicate content will be less of a problem with Flash since it’s all lumped together, the underlying code itself would need to be clearly understood by a robot. So you’ll suddenly need very clean, very well structured and very well written code. Since sometimes code which executes well is not necessarily written well, this may also pose potential spidering issues.

With the potential for so many problems, best practice remains the same. Include alternate, text based information for search engines in order to help them spider, understand and rank your site. Especially if you sell chocolate

Next time, I’ll look at the problems of javascript driven chocolate sites and how to overcome problems of the type the Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory has.

Whilst entering a search for “hitbacks” into Google, one of our link developers encountered the following helpful message (and if anyone wants to call me out as being pretentious for using the term “whilst” like one of you ponces did with Jane, then let me tell you that I wrote this on my way back from London where I had tea with the Queen so I think it’s ok in this case):

“Did you mean: wetbacks”

Normally this is where I’d issue an offensive exclamation. Wetbacks?? Did we mean WETBACKS? Holy fucking shit. This is obviously done by Google’s spell checker, and, if you look closely, you can see that, indeed, hitbacks and wetbacks are quite similar in their spelling. I only say that because I’m becoming more and more wary of the intelligence of the majority of people after the Lyndon linkbait fiasco. Just wanted to draw attention to the bleeding obvious..

The question I have is what exactly triggers the spell check to give you an alternative suggestion? There are results found for the term hitbacks, after all, 2320 to be exact (at the moment.) There are, however, sadly, 150,000 results for the term wetbacks.

According to Google, “Google’s spell checking software automatically looks at your query and checks to see if you are using the most common version of a word’s spelling. If it calculates that you’re likely to generate more relevant search results with an alternative spelling, it will ask “Did you mean: (more common spelling)?”"

How on earth does this calculation work? Oh god, it’s another one of Google’s famous relevancy algorithms! Haven’t we seen how well those tend to work with links (um, and search results)?

Does anyone remember the infamous Google Jew Watch fiasco from a few years ago? Searches for the term “Jew” were bringing up an anti-Semitic website as the top result. As you can imagine, no one but my usual flight attendant (I’ll call her Cheryl since I once hated a Cheryl) liked this (Cheryl is always very nasty to anyone ordering a kosher meal, especially when he’s sitting with a shiksa wife, and she asks questions like “did Jew want more water?”) and Google was called out for being racist. There was definitely a relevancy factor there though, and it had nothing to do with racism or anti-Semitism or the hatred that some people show towards small Yorkshire terriers. Relevancy is not something that a machine can accurately determine. At the risk of almost defending Google (gag), I do think that they are simply fighting a losing battle by attempting to determine relevancy. As I wrote awhile back, when I had inspiration and more free time and it wasn’t so freaking hot where I live and my bloodhound wasn’t 100 pounds of drooling and destructive magnificence, you can make anything seem relevant if you’re slightly clever.

Obviously my main interest here is in finding relevant links, or at least finding decent links (and sometimes shit ones) and making them seem relevant, but this affects our work on many different levels…if you’re the tiniest bit bright, you can word content in such a way that it works, for example. So IF relevancy can be so easily manipulated and faked, why does it continue to be such a big thing with the engines? If you search for “google relevancy” in Google, you’ll see over 10 million results, so people are quite concerned with this, yet I can’t imagine how accurately the relevancy of anything can be determined. Searching for a phrase such as “American watch”, for example, could give you results ranging from watches sold in the States to a site devoted to keeping the public informed about all the stupid things this country does. If that’s the exact phrase that you enter, how can Google make an accurate determination on which results are the most relevant? There are a ton of examples like this, with words typically used as verbs being used as adjectives in YOUR mind, but being interpreted as verbs if that’s their typical meaning.

Google says this about how they determine results for a query:
“We use more than 200 signals, including our patented PageRank™ algorithm, to examine the entire link structure of the web and determine which pages are most important. We then conduct hypertext-matching analysis to determine which pages are relevant to the specific search being conducted. By combining overall importance and query-specific relevance, we’re able to put the most relevant and reliable results first.”

Lots of room for error there…and you can also imagine all of the wasted money due to Google Adwords being shown and clicked on by some clueless spaz like, maybe, my mom. If you have an ad set to exact match for “stiff little fingers” because you’re selling joint cream or a carpal tunnel syndrome brace, some person with quality musical taste and a high level of impatience might excitedly click on your ad thinking she’s getting a new punk album. Those Irish boys were such jokesters anyway, so it’s an easy thing to confuse, or so I think. Humans will never be exempt from determining relevancy, no matter how hard the machines try to do it for us. You just have to figure out how to make everything fit the algorithms’ idea of relevancy.

It’s 6 o’clock in the morning, I got up especially early (whilst my daughter is still asleep) to write this post as I feel I can’t just let what I read yesterday rest and not comment.

As you may know SMX Advanced in Seattle was on last week, I didn’t go this year but attended last year. SMX Advanced is where funnily enough ADVANCED SEOs speak and attend to; learn more, broaden our horizon, share and network. Well at least that’s what I thought.

Yesterday I read this blogpost on Bruce Clay by Lisa Barone where she writes about “SMX Advanced going to the “dark” side.” The blogpost truly shocked me (and as Lisa Barone is prime blogger that might even been her intention) In fact it disturbed me to the point I even considered to put a no-follow on the link to the post, but decided to leave it, as rightly everyone should be able to voice their opinion, although I strongly disagree with Lisa’s comments and the way she went about this blogpost.

But even more so I am really disappointed and a little disturbed of Danny Sullivans comments in this blogpost. Yes of course he has his SMX brand to protect but don’t pooh on your own doorstep. At one point he literally singles out individuals:
“I’ll single out Jay Young. No, I don’t think it’s anything goes. I do think there are ethics in marketing and limits you don’t go past….” I don’t think it was needed to single out anyone really. I know Jay very well, and he is a first class SEO and respected in this industry. Jay simply stated the obvious saying that buying links can still improve your rankings. Because it does! Most SEOs STILL do buy links, he was simply saying don’t by 100,000 of them, over night and from a link farm. Be clever about it. Yes it can be argued that this is black hat’ish, BUT why is it blackhat? Because the Googlesaurus say so, that’s why. If the Google Algorithm didn’t put such a big emphasis on incoming links and other areas such as age of domain you wouldn’t call link buying black hat technique. Who says a new site is less relevant than an old site? The algorithm says so, that doesn’t mean that its actually true!!! That’s for the user to decide!! Hang on, I’m actually going somewhere with this….

I think the stamp “black hat seo” should be based on INTENT not necessarily technique. Still with me? Basically if you are doing SEO for a (new) site that is in a highly competitive market, it is NOT going to be possible to rank and gain traffic on a well constructed and content optimised site alone. That’s just a fact. Buying a few links and investing in a proper link building campaign is something you have to do to get into the really competitive market. Unless you are not planning on ranking before 2048!!! BUT that doesn’t mean the website in question isn’t relevant or useful to the user. And the end of the day, that’s what we are all working for right? Both SEOs (well most) and the engines, getting fantastic relevant and good quality websites ranked so that the user will be satisfied and find what they were looking for!!

Back to the point, so called “black hat seo” techniques are important for the development of your skills as an SEO. That doesn’t mean you have to use this knowledge and techniques, but KNOWING them WILL help you understand how the engines work, what you can and can’t do. We NEED these people to share, we should be grateful that they will share not condemn them and pick on them. I can with my hand on my heart say that I am a white hat SEO, BUT you know what, the ONE person I have learned the MOST from in this industry, is in fact a black hat, and a very skilled one as well. That doesn’t mean he is some dodgy marketer spamming the web with any random crappy website to rank his clients. A good black hat doesn’t do that

Anyway, I’ll leave the black hats that attended SMX advanced a suggestion for a T-shirt to wear to the next event (so that people don’t mistake advice for orders!!)

Ok people, have that cup of coffee, wake up and see if you can figure this one out! I’m doing an off-line to online campaign for one of my clients, CW Jobs, where the off-line ad asks you to Google the phrase “getitornot”. The idea is that the site we created (a just for fun IT test, concept being if you are in IT you “get it” and if you are not “you don’t get it”) would appear 1st and 2nd in the Google UK SERPs. With the title and meta description tag, carrying over from the off-line ad, you still with me?

We chose the phrase “getitornot” (all one word, that’s part of the concept, you get it if you type it all in one word) as it would be “easy” to rank for in a short space of time. Originally we wanted the .com as well as the .co.uk but right before our eyes (and only a week apart) the .com was snatched up (argh!!!). But seeing as the people that bought the .com hadn’t done anything with the domain (except from putting a bog standard Joomla CMS holding page on there) we thought, nah it will be fine, we just want the ranking in Google UK anyway! Right? Doesn’t seem too far fetched!??

Two weeks in, the .com is STILL ranking above co.uk! And I’m banging my head against the wall, WHY oh WHY does this domain rank 1st and 2nd in Google UK?

1. Hosting: the .com is hosted in the US while we are hosting in the UK

2. Content: they have the phrase we are targeting once in the title tag, that’s it, no more content related to the terms (except obviously in the domain itself)

3. They have NO LINKS WHATSOVER, we have nearly 100 links (some not so great, but some good quality links, AND a link from CW Jobs http://www.cwjobs.co.uk/ main site which is a high authority site (albeit the link we got is kind of buried http://www.cwjobs.co.uk/Browse/Browse/BrowseJobs.html ) Anchor text for incoming links varies between getitornot and technical test

4. Age of domain, both domains were bought in the same month (only a week apart) so age shouldn’t have an impact.

5. .Com is surely duplicate content, how many sites must feature the standard Joomla holding page?? Ok yes fair enough our two pages are in theory duplicate contentish, but surely not as much as the .com is with thousands of other sites?

SO, after analysing this to death, and asking a million and one other SEOs, the only thing I can think of being the reason why this damn .com is ranking before the .co.uk is the “power” of the .COM. Which is totally freakin annoying, as you should think a .co.uk and hosting in the UK would be a massive hint to the bots that this site is UK targeted right? Which makes me think….are the Googlebots on crack or something?

Has anyone had any similar experiences where a .com (although hosted in the US with less relevant content and no links) have outranked your .co.uk site in Google UK?

What’s your take on it?

Does anyone remember the argument put forth when the US banned online gambling that basically said that by banning the financial transactions associated with this, it would consequently open the door to new ways of funding terrorism? It made perfect sense. The same was said by Geoge Will about Prohibition. Making something bad makes PEOPLE bad. I can’t put it any better than he did with this comment: “…someone stands to make money from interfering with other people making money.” Right now, that someone is Google.

Now I’m not about to liken black hat SEOs to terrorists or makers of crap moonshine, as tempting as that would be for someone who loves satire as much as I do, but the point here is that an institution threw up a roadblock that would potentially open up giant sinkholes that would swallow many more people than the original offending acts would ever have done. Google is seriously venturing into this same territory with their constant attempts to make the web a better place (gag) and reduce SERP spam.

Think about this for a minute…during the past year, Google trashed several of our tried and true SEO techniques. Obviously we’d all be bored senseless if things stayed the same, but there were certain basics that I never thought I’d see vilified. Does this signify the fear that Google has? When they start messing around with such low-level techniques as directory listings, I have to think that it’s because they are truly at a loss over how to maintain control of something that they think has gotten out of hand. However, that is certainly their right but the main issue that I see with all of this is that it’s going to force people to sneak around and find other options. If the basics no longer help you, what else are you going to do? Put on some death rock and start getting your hands dirty.

It’s often been said, and by me especially, that the only difference between a gay man and a straight one is a 6 pack of beer. Apologies to any of you men that this has happened to of course…In the same fashion, the only difference between a white hat and a black hat is the loss of 6 places in the SERPs. If you’re fully white hat and you’ve written lovely relevant content and only received proper inbound links and your rankings go to hell in a handbasket and you have a client threatening your life (that’s a lot of ands there, sorry), chances are that you’re going to start thinking about something a little darker than meta tags. So as much as Google hates the supposedly unethical methods that the black hats employ, they’re sure as hell forcing all of it to happen aren’t they? Otherwise you’ll just sit back and watch your life fall apart.

Everyone games the system on some level. That’s what makes this all so enjoyable. I mean really, if writing content about how great your women’s dresses are is truly that stimulating, you may need to lessen the amount of drugs that you ingest and stop listening to Enya all damn day. Or just get all dolled up in something frilly and get over it…the basics of SEO are honestly not that exciting, no matter what many white hats say. The fact that we may have to rewrite the basics IS exciting, though. I’m really quite sick of meta tags anyway.

Back in the day when I cloaked every site I worked on, I had fun. I even giggled with glee when I got my first site banned because I was excited by the challenge of getting it relisted. Some people argued that I cloaked because I couldn’t compete without using black hat techniques, but the fact is that I thought it was the best idea at the time in order to get good rankings in Google, since all my sites sucked a duck’s arse back then. When you’re dealing with a 4 page site with no text and a homepage consisting of nothing more than an image, cloaking is really, really appealing. Especially when it got number one rankings and massive amounts of traffic. So let me ask you this…if the Google algorithm was built to rank you due to your inbound links, why was I so easily able to get number one rankings without having more than 3 relevant inbounds? I could easily outrank sites that had tons of links, tons of content, etc. just with keyword stuffing the beJaysus out of a few cloaked pages. Talk about gaming the system…and thus we have yet another hole in the Google algorithm. Technically speaking, Google made me cloak. Ahem.

The links thing is quite possibly Google’s biggest hole at the moment, but they’re certainly doing everything in their power to fix that. It’s making us all have to THINK too, which is nice, for once. However, when they start devaluing the fundamental things that one does in order to build the foundation of an SEO campaign, that’s when it’s seriously apparent that things aren’t going so well on their end. And I love it, honestly. It’s hard to be white hat all the way right now, and it’s getting even harder with each little tweak of the algorithm. What’s going to be the next argument then? Social vs. mobile media? How will we sling THAT mud? I can’t wait to find out.

As predictable as the seasons are the debates that come and go regarding search optimisation.  As pages of publications flip and fingers whirr over keyboards, the change in the wind heralds yet another round of bashing search - and those of us who work in the industry.

Part of finding what we want on the World Wide Web involves a search of some sort.  We google on Google, ask on Ask, and search on Yahoo! & Live all the while attempting to uncover some piece of information, find that hidden gem.

Yet as the web gets more and more complex, we find ourselves abandoning traditional search techniques to utilise the ‘wisdom of crowds’ - looking to social search and Yahoo! answers, search trails and StumbleUpon to help us find our way online.

Does the new trend in using social resources spell the end of search?  Thankfully (for people like me) it does not.  Brand awareness, online marketing, being found on search, optimising for location, creating buzz and a dozen other things are now a part of search engine marketing and optimisation.

In this new Web 2.0 world, having an expert on your side is as important as ever, whether that expert is an agency or someone in-house.  Search will never die - the way in which we use the web and interact with engines like Yahoo! and Google will.

It’s all over the blogosphere (a word that I hate but hey, it works here) that PageRank has decreased for many sites recently, possibly due to them being penalized for buying links. Google isn’t confirming the reason right now. Normally we try not to comment on items that have been commented upon endlessly, but I’ll make an exception here since a very sweet reader asked for my opinion and, when informed that I wasn’t planning to write about it since everyone else was doing so already, he said that he wasn’t planning on reading anyone else’s opinion. He wanted mine, so here you go…and thanks Gene. You’ve obviously received the bribery check.

Here’s my crackpot theory: Google drops the PageRank for enough sites that it becomes noteworthy, bloggers take to the net and discuss/fume/rant for a bit, everyone speculates that it’s a paid link witchhunt, and fear of Google is renewed. Paid links become the next really dirty thing in SEO. Sites lose some of their “authority” and rush to spend more money in paid (Google) ads just to make a preemptive strike towards any potential loss of rankings and/or traffic. Google, as always, wins.

Google is a seriously cocky enterprise. Yes, they probably do deserve to be, but cockiness is always an ugly trait that usually gets worse and only very, very rarely gets better until something extremely humbling happens. Since we don’t really have a major contender in the engine world right now, I don’t expect the humbling to happen any time soon. So, with all of us freaking out about PageRank decreases, they can easily see that, once again, they have successfully scared the bejaysus out of all of us. This is bad because it makes them strut around like a mean little rooster. Note that, in the spirit of maturity (newfound, no less), I am not making any cock jokes. Not right now, at least.

I do believe that Google wants to prevent what they view as the buying and selling of authority, just as I do believe that they want to make the user experience the best possible. My issue with them is their motive for all of this…I certainly do not believe that they are simply seriously trying to make the net a better place just because they’re all decent people and it’s the right thing to do. If the recent PageRank decrease is, in fact, an effort to crack down on sites that buy links, why aren’t they coming right out and saying that? Because it imposes fear on people who might want to somehow try and work the system that THEY created. They’re not really big fans of exploitation you know. They built an algorithm based on promoting sites that had great inbound links. If they failed to imagine that people would exploit that, they’re bigger idiots than I thought previously.

Apparently many of the sites that are popular in Digg have had their PageRank lowered. What’s the motive HERE? As many people have pointed out, not all of the affected sites DO buy links. Many of them are, reputedly, being smacked because they are in some way associated with some potentially iffy interlinking. So the lesson here, one of fear again, is that you really should be careful about your associations. That sounds very high school doesn’t it? If you’re friends with this group, we’ll throw you out of the math club! OK that never happened but the fear of it still rings loudly in my head at times like this.

Overall, I don’t buy the notion that Google updates its algorithm for the benefit of humanity. I doubt that you do, either, of course, but since we all have to deal with Google, what can be done? You can’t simply ignore them. The alternatives are highly unattractive. If you keep doing what they say is big bad stuff, you’re going to risk having the rug pulled out from under you at some point. The best solution is to continue to find ways to hide it…as much as all the whitehats criticize blackhats, it’s times like this when they should be looking to them for advice. It’s not terribly difficult to hide the fact that your links are paid, after all. Hiding your interlinking blog schemes may be a bit tricky though…but someone will find a way, and it will be made public, and we’ll do it, and then they’ll catch it and there will be another update. THAT aspect of Google isn’t going away any time soon.

I recently overheard (hence the reference to ‘grapevines’ in my title ;o) two interesting facts about how Google evaluates the legitimacy of a site. So - being a more of a marketing orientated person than an SEO one, I wanted to put the two out there and see if anyone can offer to shed a bit of light over the reliability of this info:

1. Is it true that if Google sees more than 88 outbound list on a single domain, they are likely to consider it a ’scraper’ site? Now, I presume that it would also depend on a combination of a few other factors - like the age of the domain… But can you confirm or deny the essence of the core statement?




2. And secondly, is it true that if you bought a new domain, you should register it for longer than the initial 1 year, if you wanted to be taken more seriously by Google and possibly avoid spending too long in its ’sand box’? (of course only if you intended on keeping the domain in the long term).

Thanks in advance :o)

Have you been sitting around, bored out of your mind and wondering what nefarious and mind-blowingly ridiculous things your favorite little search engines have been up to lately? Here’s a quick roundup in case you haven’t been paying attention to all the ethical aspects of our collective internet obsession…

Yahoo!
Yahoo recently claimed to have simply been obeying Chinese law when handing over personal details of Wang Xiaoning, a Chinese man who had been openly critical of the Chinese government. Wang Xiaoning was subsequently sentenced to ten years in prison. His horrific crime was promoting democracy through the use of an online forum. In response to this, and other incidents, Yahoo is being sued in a U.S. court for aiding and abetting torture in China. Yahoo’s response to the lawsuit? The users knew the risks they were taking when they violated Chinese law.

My take on this? Yahoo should never have set up shop in China in the first place. Yes, they should have to obey Chinese laws if they’re operating over there, but when will it be time to refuse to do business with oppressive regimes?

Google
The National Legal and Policy Center, a U.S.-based ethics group, is appealing to Congress to prevent Google from allowing pirated movies to appear on YouTube. They’re really, really upset about it too. My take on this one? Copyright violations and pirated movies? Ye gads the world is going to hell in a handbasket. If this is the worst thing you’re doing, you’re still better than anyone else. I’m always first in line for a pirated version of absolutely anything. So, if you have anything good, let me know.

In news that’s so weird you think it must be a hoax, Google is currently being sued for $5m by an American man (figures) named Dylan Stephen Jayne who says that, when his social security number is viewed upside down, it forms a scrambled version of the word “Google” and thus his life is in danger. His complaint to the court was also handwritten. This man is most likely distantly related to me, since crazy hijinks of this type seem to run rampant through the Joyce genes. Also, when I write out the first letter of my 12 favorite punk bands, it forms an anagram of “Jayne is crazy” so I guess this is my last post, seeing as I’ll soon be gunned down. Um, I think my take on this has thus been made quite obvious. This guy could take make a freight train take a dirt road.

MSN
Microsoft is seeking seeking $100,000 in damages per domain name in a typo-squatting case against Anthony Peppler. Peppler could be on the hook for as much as $9.5 million. Apparently this horrible man has purchased domain names that are “confusingly similar” to MSN domains. For example, if you’re an idiot and you misspell MSN, you might go to one of Peppler’s domains. Apparently it’s a bad idea to confuse consumers. My take on this? If you’re typing in an MSN-related site, you deserve to get tricked. Peppler should take it one step further and create software that pops a fist out of the user’s computer screen to punch MSN users in the face too.

Let me know if I’ve missed any other egregious misuses of public trust…

When I was a youngster, my grandma always said, or yelled rather, “you’re gonna turn into a damned grilled cheese sandwich!” because I ate them constantly. At first I had lovely visions of being all gooey and buttery but then I realized that Grandma was really just a forward thinker who first began to envision the notion of “You are what you search.” In my mind, at least. The problem is, you’re not.

There’s a great article in the September 18, 2007 PC Magazine. And no I do not regularly read this periodical. It was pointed out to me. It’s entitled “You Are What You Search” just like this post! I can’t believe they have the nerve to copy me. Anyway, it’s about Google’s Web History project, something you might not have paid too much attention to.

Basically, the article explains that Google’s Web History project can create a record of everything you have ever searched for, for as long as you let it run. You have to sign up for this, thank goodness. The question is, why on earth would you want to? There are better ways to keep up with what you search for and find online you know. Even though you can pause the functionality or delete past search results, you still have to worry about the potential for your data becoming public knowledge. If you’re automatically logged into iGoogle and, let’s say, it’s not you but someone else who is using your computer momentarily, this person now has access to your search history. There are other ways in which people could get this information, but the point is that your search history isn’t guaranteed to be private.

I’ve written about the dangers of being defined by what you do online, and it’s really a serious concern (not that it stops me from searching for everything from the size of gorilla testicles to dirty limericks about the Irish.) My last piece on this issue mainly dealt with the problems of machines determining intent, but let’s think about the human potential for misinterpretation here for a minute…and I will give you an example of how quickly this can happen, at the risk of really offending the person who did this search. Oh well, it’s all in the essence of enlightening the readers.

Someone, whom I shall refer to as Sid, let me use his computer to look something up once when mine wasn’t hooked up. I was attempting to view something Sid had recently shown me, but when I hit the back button I saw something that read “naked crit.” You can imagine that the r in “crit” seemed to be to simply be a misspelling, and I began to think Sid was a big sick monkey with ill intentions. However, after questioning Sid about his interest in naked crits, he explained that a naked crit is a bike race where people are naked. I was thus a bit placated about this but the point is that it was easily misinterpreted. I also thought that Google was a porn portal when I first saw it in a URL, since I read it as “Go ogle” and no, I am not joking.

What would someone think of you if he or she had access to YOUR web search history? With the misinterpretations made by humans and machines, it’s unfathomable to imagine. Maybe your boss wants to sit down and show you a bit of code that he thinks is better than what you have, and he gets on your computer. I once worked for someone who loved to do this, and really loved to accidentally click on flashing IM windows and pretend not to know what they were while she read them. Considering that I was not always at my most professional on IM, you can only imagine the names I was calling my friend Heather. Heather knew that I didn’t truly think she was a raging whore whose herpes test had just come back positive, but my boss didn’t get this. Plus, it’s not nice to call coworkers a whore, especially between the hours of 9am and 5pm. Usually.

This quote from Google really concerns me though…
“Web History is accessible only by signing in to your Google Account with your username and password. As long as you don’t share your username and password, your web history should remain completely private.” Notice the “should” bit about remaining completely private.

And this bit is even more worrying…
“Web History uses the information from your web history or other information you provide us to improve your Google search experience, such as improving the quality of your search results and providing recommendations. In addition to enabling the Web History functionality, the information we collect when you use Web History may be shared among all of our services in order to provide you with a seamless experience and to improve the quality of our services. We will not disclose this information to other companies or individuals, except in the limited circumstances described in our main Google Privacy Policy, or with your consent.” Do you want their recommendations? Do you want a seamless experience? Do you want to be used as a white mouse for their quality service testing?

As the article points out, most people are already having their searches tracked through Google’s PageRank features on its toolbar, and god only knows where else since not everyone is as forthright about it as Google. This Web History simply lets YOU see the data too. It actually makes me want to stop searching for “ninja kitten” all the time lest I be seen as someone whose chakras need to be manipulated. So think carefully before participating in this project. As I say, you’re still being tracked in some way most likely, but don’t go out of your way to participate in this type of thing. Just think of the ramifications of a full month of your personal usage history being compromised.