Slashdot Mirror
Google Patent for User Targeted Search Results
lorenbake writes "Scoble is one of many to report that Google has filed a patent for user targeted, or attention targeted, search results which will change the ranking of Google's organic results per each individual user based upon that user's search behavior, location, sites visited, and even 'typing behavior'. How could Google build such user profiles to serve customized organic (non-paid) results to? Tracking via their network of desktop apps, advertising, Gmail, and other network services."
Do no evil. Unless you have shareholders?
~S
2084. Google will rule the government. Wherever you look, everything you see will be tailored to what you want to see. Screw normal advertising, you'll be seeing "Google AdSense billboards" which display roadside alerts and stuff based on whatever you're thinking. Google is the new thought police...
Creative misinterpretation is your friend.
I'm sure you two will get along.
The main reason any big company patents anything is so they can violate the patents of other companies.
"What's that, Microsoft? We're violating your patent #314159265? Well you're violating our patent number #299792458. Lets call it even, shall we?"
It's about (= 'Google 'good), but also about (= 'patents 'evil), what to do, what to THINK!!!
Before this goes all big brother...
I just want to say that I hove no problem with targeted advertising at all. If there is a way that does not impose on my personal freedoms to selectiviely show me things that I might be interested in purchasing it is not only ok but much preffered to the massive spamvertisement campaigns that go on now.
-- The morphemes of your disquisition are ascertainable, but they have eschewed an ambit of transpicuous exposition.
It is about a stupid patent and is therefor evil. F google when they pull this crap.
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
All I want...is the ability to easily opt out.
Don't allow cookies accross sessions, dispose of your personalities and change your gmail accounts regularly, use only GPG 4096-byte encrypted text in your gmail account, put on your tinfoil hat when thinking anything at all and - you'll still be within the System, tracked and numbered.
You must know that in reality you cannot sum things up as just plain "good" or "evil". We are getting the lesser of evils, would you rather msn had the patent? I think we are better off with google having it, after all someone would eventually.
Those guys at $oogle are making Microsoft look like amateurs when it comes to world domination!
The more you regulate a company, the worse its products become.
... includes yours.
Oh, was that my outside voice?
My Gmail account is my "send everything here" account. It gets spam from every where from tin foil hat sites to live journal. If you can find a way to work out what I like from "Person X has replied to your comment with 'lol, I agree' " then that's fine by me.
I like muppets.
Let's face it, the only economic reason for a company to build and host a bunch of unrelated applications is to link together advertising and user profiles. Why else would a search engine be talking about providing free WiFi service? So they can track users' locations and deliver location-targeted ads.
---- "If we have to go on with these damned quantum jumps, then I'm sorry that I ever got involved" - Erwin Schrodinger
Where computers and systems know what you want and then give it to you. Good? Evil? Well that all depends on intent doesn't it.
Deleted
NO! the abuse of ptents is evil, and Google has yet to do this, they are just defending themselves in the arms race against ass-hats like Bezose and Gates, who patented the single and double clicks respectively, and other such loonicy. Google has yet to cross thhe line, untill they do, I will respect them -- HELL, if they havent abused teir power by now, why would they start?
On some seaches you perform you see a "personalized results (BETA)" message. I didn't really have a chance to determine whether the results are better, other than that it ranks the sites you visited before higher.
Perhaps they are filing the patent to prevent other companies from filing a similar patent and then using it against Google? Google has already started down the road of targetted ads for their users and storing everything they can about the user's search habits.
For example, if you sign up for a personalized google page, they'll start tracking your searchs, and they will even let you go back and look at the searches that you made weeks ago.
I personally like this kind of stuff. It's useful to me if I forgot to bookmark a site that I liked, I can go back through my search history and find the site again.
Don't count your messages before they ACK.
All the clues were there: context-sensitive ads in GMail was just an obvious one. If you sign up for an account with Google, you agree to their licensing terms; you do the same when instsalling an operating system from a corporation who shall not be named. If you don't like the idea that Google has access to your email, realize that any other provider has the same privileges; it's just that Google, intelligently (but not necessarily morally defensible), chose to take advantage of them. If you didn't use Google, it would be your ISP or another email provider (unless you have your own server).
TANSTAAFL.
... as all the Google fanboys do mental summersaults to twist reality to fit the conflicting notions that Google can do nothing wrong, and yet web patents are so very, very wrong...
... make the voices stop, please?"
... erk ... ack ... (transmission terminated)"
I can see it now, future headline:
Google CEO Revealed as Beelzebub Prince of Darkness, Mountain View New 7th Circle of Hell
Slashdot comments:
"Well, you know, Satan *is* very misunderstood"
"Gmail still rocks! I don't care if the Google minions sacrifice a kitten every time I check my mail, as long as I have my 100 TB of storage! Whoohoo!"
"I just sold my eternal soul for more relevant search results - but hey, I got a great price on this DVD player! Thanks Asmodeus!"
"My monitor smokes a bit when I do searches now, but hey - I can find out what all my friends have been *really* thinking about me! Hey, this new GoogleBrainCrawler kicks butt! Go Google! But
"Yahoo! made a deal with the ancient Nordic Gods but they're just playing catch up at this point"
"Jeez guys, if it was Microsoft making a deal with Belial then we'd be all over it but just because it's Google, you're all
Okay, here's a tinfoil-wrapped theory for your light enjoyment:
Psychologists have long claimed that advertising affects our psyches (e.g., cartoon shows' cereal and toy ads, the NFL's beer ads...). Google proposes to detect those changes in our psyches, and presumably to reinforce them. This could amount to a self-fulfilling and dangerous feedback-loop... resulting in mental image-burn, if not outright transformation. Before the body-snatching takes hold, I'm writing my congressperson...
Seeing bad movies only encourages them. Watch responsibly
Makes perfect sense for google to track which links i click on - essentially i'm filtering out the type results I don't want, so if the search algorithm can learn from that and produce more relevant results, then great!
Privacy isn't such an issue on this considering Google already has this information on a per user level - this probably doesn't raise any additional privacy concerns.
Drag n' Drop DVD Recommendations
Since filing a patent is evil, Google has violated its "do no evil" policy.
Queue someone claiming that it's a defensive patent, and Google is just using the system to defend themselves. Of course that sort of claim is pure nonsense.
Anyways, it's hardly new - Google has been using the patent system since they first hit the scene with PageRank.
Google is not necessarily evil for doing taking out a patent. We live in a world of IP and patents. They probably have to do this for protection.
However, if Google starts using this patent to thwart their competition then they'll be making a mockery of their own do-no-evil slogan.
I'm sure I could write a witty comment about how the once noble Google has fallen from grace and sold its soul, rising like a rocket to the grat and smog filled heights of modern corperate decadence, but the storyline has probably been patented by now.
May the Maths Be with you!
If you don't want to support the 767-buying, patent-filing search engine, you could switch to ...
... the search engine that snitches on dissidents to the secret police of totalitarian China!
... the search engine run by a bullying monopoly that has run afoul of anti-trust laws.
... the search engine of another company looking to exploit the patent system.
Suddenly I'm wishing at least one university had held on to its search engine (Stanford had Google and Berkeley Inktomi) before spinning it out to make bucks.
We'll have sweet revenge when the goatse trolls run an innocuous search for their boss and get their "personalized results."
Google is getting worse and worse with privacy. From a geek point of view, they got a bunch of cool apps, but from a humanist point of view, I feel google is definately turning over to the dark side.
In a couple of years, we will probably be discussing Google and privacy concerns just like we discuss Microsoft and security concerns now.
It's been so long since I've used a rival search engine/site that I don't even know who the second best one is. I do remember that many of them also returned google search results along with their own. I don't imagine that Google will be able to profile other search sites the way it does individual users because so many users will create near randomness. So maybe those results will become better than results acquired directly from Google.
Unfortunately, in the real world, things are not so black and white.
It is a part of the 'owner's manual' included with their SEC filing.
Co-founders release Google 'owner's manual'
Perhaps not so much 'buyer beware' as 'buyer be advised'. Investors know up front what the company is about and Google is not obligated to aggressively pursue short term profits by whatever means for its share holders. It has explicitly told them it will not do that.
Loose lips lose spit.
it is kinda covered by a previous amazon patent, besides displaying an ad on a visitors behaviour exists for a long time:
....
.... e.g. you can distingush grandma typing 1 letter per 5 seconds, while mr 10-finger-typer geek can type 5+ letters in a sec :) hmm ... strange idea .... ..... cool idea:) never thought of that ....
:)
....
e.g.
My visitor is looking at portable mp3 audio players for the last 5 visits, you want to display an ipod commercial instead of a hairdryer.
When that user searches for "moby audio tracks" you will present results ranked higher for places that sell mp3 other than LPs.
Respect to google, but I think it is also a common knowledge patent. I mean what I mentioned is an afternoon of SQL query tuning that I do not want to compare to millions of results organized by google, but at the end that patent seems to cover a bunch of similar practices that fall under the
"search result ordering based on user behaviour"
the typing issue is a good idea though
I guess it also includes typo watch, misspell watch and similar
now google will start displaying ads about "quit drinking" or "hangover pills" when compared to my normal daily typing I start typing terribly on a late Saturday night ? ARE YOU DRUNK ?
now google just needs to start putting a HAL-like glowing red eye and microphones into our rooms, an anal implant and urine and stool analyzer to provide perfect results
off topic:
I mentioned it already , but interestingly the more and more google refines it's algo, the more and more I find myself using other search engines, as some of the things I am searching for provide less and less usable information for me...
for tech stuff google is unbeatable, however shopping/comparing and travel, I turn to yahoo more and more nowadays.....
These are actions Google has actually taken:
x ?NewsId=14130)
)
Helped Chinese authorities to censor their subjects' Internet access.
(http://www.cdrinfo.com/Sections/News/Details.asp
Selectively approved and refused ads, based on political content.
(http://www.unknownnews.net/google.html)
(http://www.thenation.com/doc/20040830/reilly)
Permanently collected search history for everyone who has ever used their site.
(http://www.google.com/intl/en/privacypolicy.html
(http://www.techweb.com/wire/ebiz/161500535)
Permanently collected/indexed the email history and content of all gmail users, for marketing and law-enforcement use.
(http://mail.google.com/mail/help/privacy.html)
Filed obvious software patents.
(Refer to this slashdot story.)
For me, when people's actions directly contradict their words, I reduce my trust in them accordingly. Google can keep claiming to "do no evil," but the words are becoming more and more empty.
"How is it evil? It could be evil because its very powerful but in the right hands.. it could be good for everyone."
There's a simple way to tell if someone is likely to abuse power. When someone collects power over you, and states that it's for a purpose which doesn't require that power, you are being misled.
This has been driving me nuts for some time now.
Often, when trying to find some information at work, I'll try a Google search, and
make a note of the search terms in order to continue working at home. Then when I go
home and type in the same set of keywords, I'll get a completely different set of
search results, with the articles I was reading now missing.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
I have absolutely no problem with this. I really don't care how detailed they want to get in their information gathering. After all, I'm one in a few billion people, what are the chances that any of my 'private' information would ever be surfaced in any way.
I don't see this as an invasion of privacy. I see it as a business filling the need of a customer, one who wants to find the exact information they're looking for, and instantly.
My tech blog
This may be a disaster for Person X trying to communicate to Person Y how to search for a particular topic. The terms that yield good results for X may receive hidden help from X's personal context, which is totally murky and can't be readily communicated to Y, let alone typed in the search box...
As a simplified example, consider how the agriculture professor and a freshman student may end up with wildly divergent search results for "Onion"...
Patents can be a good thing in the right hands. If google allows anyone to use the technology it could be a good thing, because if they control it companies like Microsoft can't charge us for it. Google could get the patent, use it against microsoft, but allow open source not for profit groups to do with the technology as they please.
Lobbying for software patents: Bad.
Applying for software patents: Sometimes necessary today, but shouldn't be.
Bragging about granted software patents: Impresses stock market, pisses me off.
Using patents offensively: Bad.
Using patents only defensively: Ok.
We'll see what Google does...
So when I google myself I'll look really popular on the web!
Yes, if you keep clicking on the links from blog to blog, you will find the actual patent links.
/. readers on a wlid goose chase.
It would be helpful if submitters included such links directly rather than sending all the interested
I hate call waitin`~+~~~
NO CARRIER