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.

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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.

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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.

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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)

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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…

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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.

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There’s a fantastic short story about Google in the new Radar that has the following (only semi-unlikely) premise:

Google kind of takes over the world. It’s being used to help the US Department of Homeland Security try and catch potential terrorists (searching anything and everything with which you’ve ever been associated online) and determining who’s a high risk by examining suspicious emails and performed searches. Like with racial profiling, if you met certain statistical criteria for something (such as, in this case, possible terrorist leanings), you’re thus subject to being Googlestalked. The only way around this is to get Googlecleaned, a process that “normalizes” your data.

It’s a story that amuses me and kind of scares the bejaysus out of me at the same time, because it’s not all that far-fetched.

Think about it this way…if every move you made online was triggering related information to be stored in a database and associated with you, what would the total picture say about you? And what if information obtained 5 years ago was still considered to be an accurate assessment of your exact beliefs and interests today? How would knowing what could happen change your online behavior? With all of us changing our online behavior, the statistics would become more and more skewed, thus leading to bigger discrepancies in who could indeed be a potential ANYTHING. Do you see the problem with this?

Let’s say that we are the sum total of our web searches and recorded online conversations. That would make me a Brian Dennehy stalker (not that I am denying it or anything–can you seriously tell me he isn’t good looking?) and maybe he’d have me arrested. George Bush would personally come down here to NC and kick my ass for all the things I say about him in my IM conversations. I refuse to link to anything associated with him though.

I’d probably get into serious trouble just for the leftist people that I routinely email (they’re my friends!) and you’d think that I wouldn’t listen to anything other than late 70s and early 80s punk rock. Ok that last part is kind of true but anyway, it doesn’t accurately reflect me enough to form a stereotype from which I’d never deviate. I wouldn’t want to be judged by any of it. But I WOULD be…and let’s say that, since I have emailed a friend who belongs to the Communist Workers Party here, I am now associated with that group even though I have nothing to do with them and no plans to ever join them. I’m now flagged as a threat. While I like the thought of being able to intimidate people, this isn’t cool at all.

What about the sites you accidentally click on? I’m not talking about the ones you PRETEND to have accidentally reached, I mean the ones where your computer is running slowly and you’ve spazzed out and are randomly clicking your mouse around and cursing like Father Jack. Hard to believe anyone is that stupid (ahem) but it happens, I imagine. What about the whole issue of semantics? Misspellings? God help us all if I am ever associated with a group of poor spellers. I already have one foot in the grave and one on a banana peel.

What about the emails where you’re referencing a joke to someone who knows exactly what you mean, but the content could very easily be taken completely out of context and miscontrued as something malicious? My emails to a friend that read things like “Dear Eric, DIE DIE DIE. Don’t be surprised when your brakes fail! Love, Julie” would seem to suggest that I have a violent streak upon which I am about to act. Google is an intelligent entity, there’s no doubt about it, but can it detect the humor that most humans can’t understand?

What would normalizing your information mean anyway? Do you want to be normalized? Considering the average person in the country, I wouldn’t. I don’t want my profile to say that I listen to country music, vote Republican, never pick up a novel unless it’s fallen and blocked my path on the way to the Golden Corral buffet, and eat gummy worms at least twice a week. I’d almost rather be considered a threat to national security. I can also say, from experience, that the government doesn’t have much of a sense of humor, and unfortunately mine is so highly inappropriate that I would get into quite a bit of trouble while the real bad apples rolled away, unnoticed.

So pick up Radar or go online and read the story if you can. It’s really pretty scary when you start seriously thinking about it. If you do, in fact, get scared, just think of dancing cats and you’ll be fine.

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Is Google going to be the next MSN? I would like to apologize for my lack of a witty title here…when Microsoft is involved, my brain kind of shuts down.

If you’re one of the rare, rare people who actually thinks MSN is a thing as fine as a newly-discovered Fawlty Towers episode, let me explain to you that most people, or should I say most NORMAL people whose knuckles don’t bleed when they walk, really hate MSN. Not only is the engine a right piece of crap, but the company itself seems to be so seriously annoying that it’s in danger of being sued constantly over something ridiculous. Honestly, I have trouble listening to Brian Eno and Robert Fripp now that it’s been made abundantly and painfully public that they had something to do with the startup sounds…I can’t keep talking about that or I’ll sob again though.

Microsoft was investigated for antitrust violations as you all know, settling in 2002 with promises to stop being so damned overbearing with all of their products and to help their competitors write software that would run properly on the Windows systems. This period of altruism is supposed to expire this November, but there are already talks of it being extended due to Vista’s possible issues.

Consumer groups are already requesting that the Federal Trade Commission review Google’s proposed purchase of the internet advertising company DoubleClick. Just as was the case with Microsoft, European regulators plan to follow up the American probes with their own. That sounds stangely dirty. Lauren Weinstein, the co-founder of People for Internet Responsibility, is quoted in the San Jose Mercury News as saying “Just as concerns about Microsoft gradually increased until they reached critical mass, I think that is starting to happen with Google…We are starting to approach a tipping point in all this, where the risks to Google are becoming greater and greater.”

The antitrust bit is just one problematic angle with Google, however. They are simply everywhere, and they’re expanding faster than a redneck at a Golden Corral buffet. Lots of people don’t really feel all warm and toasty about Google any more. Just the other day as my husband and I were walking up the street, he was harrassed due to his Google t-shirt. I didn’t mean to be so rude to him but I couldn’t help myself. Ok that’s a joke–one of our neighbors simply lacks class and began yelling “yahoo!” at us. We ran like hell as groups of dirty schoolkids threw rotten eggs at us. OK that didn’t happen but you get the point I hope. Anti-Google sentiment is growing.

From what I’ve gathered, the San Jose conference was rife with Google complaints. This says to me that it’s not simply my own dislike of anything popular that causes me to become somewhat enraged at the fact that, to do well online, Google is usually what matters. When they change their algorithm, even if it’s going to cause the loss of rankings in another engine, most of us still adhere to what Google wants and we make the changes. We use their analytics software because it’s free. We pay tons of money for paid ads in AdWords, and we use Google as our default engine to the extent that some of us (not me of course) get so into PageRank that, when it goes up 1 point, we throw a celebratory riverside hootenanny. We love it and we hate it. I don’t know of anyone who ever really loved Microsoft, but just like Google, they were on top and they had to pay for it. It looks like Google could be heading down the same path.

Google has always been renowned for their “free” services, from analytics to email. They also tend to have really good products, to their credit. Their stock has performed at an insanely high level, and they are now a legitimate verb. That is pretty impressive. I understand how they invade my privacy and the privacy of everyone else, though. While I am concerned about it, it’s well-known that I have a thing for Adam Ant and kneehigh leather boots so I’m not too embarrassed that they have that information. I would just really love to see an alternative pop up soon, not only to give Google the competition that they need to continue to better themselves, but to give us something different that’s worth our time. Yahoo and MSN really aren’t doing that, unfortunately.

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I am a firm believer in leaving people alone unless they’re doing something detrimental to children and/or animals, trashing Joe Strummer’s good name, or harassing my favorite Viking. That being said, it should come as no surprise that I am firmly against turning in your competitors for violating webmaster guidelines. First of all, it’s an extension of tattling as a child. Secondly, it’s just bad karma. You’re going to do something bad at some point and you’re going to really wish the person who turned you in for it was nice like you should have been when you turned someone else in for something asinine like using doorway pages to rank one spot ahead of you.

I’ve worked with SEOs who choose the path of least resistance in getting ahead in the SERPs, which usually means digging around on a higher ranking site and reporting on findings when turning them in to Google. That technique might clear the path for you a bit, but it’s a sign that you obviously don’t know how to get ahead without hurting someone else, which, to me, says you’re not a great SEO. You might, however, think about going into American politics.

We all know that Google frowns upon cloaking. Still, if your competitor IS cloaking, figure out how to beat him at his game without resorting to tattling on him. You may have skeletons in your own closet, after all, and in many cases it’s going to be apparent to someone who’s been doing the tattling. I have dealt with clients who would give me the names of competitors and ask me to dig around to find out if I could turn them into Google for anything. In most cases, I have indeed found something, but I’ve never turned anyone in. I also have never transported Dracula at night or eaten a candy apple. There are lines I will not cross.

Analyzing how your competitors do things is a key part of SEO, and it’s helpful to figure out WHY they’re ranking higher than you are. However, once you ascertain that they’re doing something that violates Google’s guidelines, for example, just keep it to yourself please, as full of yourself as you are. When you use this information to harm someone else you’re the equivalent of the office arse-kisser, tattling on coworkers in order to get in good with the big boss. It’s horribly ill-mannered behavior, and it’s not something that a good Southerner does.

It’s been my experience that the black hats of SEO are the ones who inspire my utter awe. I am completely fascinated by black hat techniques, especially the really hardcore ones that involve writing code that I couldn’t possibly begin to imagine how to do. These people have serious talent, and I don’t really care how they use it. If they’re ahead of me in the rankings, kudos to them. If these black hats were working on coding the search engine algorithms, maybe we wouldn’t need all the spam reporting tools, because the engines would be smart enough to catch spam without relying on humans to do it for them.

Turning in your competitors is not an act of improving the internet for the rest of us either. That’s an argument that’s making less sense the more I hear it. Honestly, the ideal of doing SEO with the goal of simply making the web a better place where kittens can frolic is lovely, but I really do not believe that it’s anyone’s true desire. We do SEO because we want to make our sites do better than everyone else’s.

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Is how a search engine handles your private data going to soon determine whether or not you use it?

In a recent decision, Ask.com has told users that it will no longer store data on their queries. This sounds very nice of course, until you get down into the nitty gritty of it and learn that it’s almost meaningless. So basically, for those of you who like to conduct searches on items such as men’s girdles, rare Adam and the Ants singles, and BASIC programming guides, you should still be a little worried that your user data could haunt you at some point (this is excluding how it simply affects you to know what Adam looks like these days.)

Here’s the main problem with this: their partners could potentially still be privvy to this so-called private data. Considering all of the blasting I’ve heard over the years about everyone wanting to get their claws on all of our data, this does actually concern me a bit. Keywords used in an Ask search can still be seen in the web address bar, and your ISP can still get this information. Apparently Ask plans on reviewing this issue with their partners and wants to come to an agreement on how this data can be used. Still, why say you’re not going to keep private data if, in fact, you really are keeping it, even if it’s by passing it onto another party?

Obviously this information can’t really hurt you if it’s not being kept. However, the promises of purging it and no longer retaining it seem way too good to be true. Obviously I am not too embarrassed to be searching for Adam and the Ants singles, although I will acknowledge that I SHOULD be, but I certainly do not want Google knowing that I am also a big fan of Clap Your Hands Say Yeah in light of their second album’s being crap. This is extremely humiliating and could potentially wreck me if it came out in court.

Google and MSN will supposedly purge user data after 18 months. Google’s cookies are now going to expire in 2 years, not in 2038 (which is about when the last batch of chocolate chip cookies my mom made will expire…I almost needed dental work.) MSN “apparently” stores its search information so that it can’t be attached to personal information. Yahoo is going to “anonymize” data after 13 months. My head is spinning around like Linda Blair’s did in the Exorcist, and I am not even wearing a nightgown right now so it’s not nearly as funny.

I have never been a private person. Just ask the tons of horrified people who have been witness to me after one glass of red wine. People who constantly complain about their lack of privacy usually have something nasty to hide, like an affection for Celine Dion, but I’m beginning to see their side of things. I’m not beginning to see their affection for Celine, of course, because that is incomprehensible, but I am beginning to understand that, where privacy is concerned, there are some simple principles that we should think about.

We should all be aware that most of what we do online can be recorded in some way. That still won’t stop most of us from calling our boss a horrible troll on Yahoo IM (although I don’t do this), sending Photoshopped photos of our friends done up as Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz to everyone we know, or looking for thigh-high latex boots. However, we need to realize that just because we’re sitting behind a screen, we’re not anonymous in the eyes of the search companies or our ISPs.

The real questions: How will you react to this? Will you continue to use Google if it keeps all your information, or will you switch to something like MSN if it turns out that their privacy policy makes you the happiest? Is privacy THAT much of an issue? If it’s not going to haunt you in a legal manner, do you really care? Are you going to search for “Celine Dion in thigh-high latex boots” and hope you get caught so you can get help?

So, some feedback please, if you would…nothing about this issue is black or white. What are your thoughts on this?

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