Slashdot Mirror
Google Nabs Patent To Monitor Your Cursor Movement
bool2 writes "Google has been awarded a patent for displaying search results based on how you move your mouse cursor on the screen... Google's plans are to monitor the movements of the cursor, such as when a user hovers over a certain ad or link to read a tooltip, and then provide relevant search results, and ads, based on that behaviour. It means that it does not require users to actually click a link to know that they were interested in it, opening a world of opportunity for even more focused ads."
Fuck adverts.
Hover on this comment and it will change to something relevant.
I wouldn't want to deal with no-click shopping.
Any insufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
Just wait until low-cost eyeball tracking is perfected. Now, if I could only get everyone to wear my patent-pending tin-foil anti-tracking helmets, I'd make a fortune.
"No matter how cynical you get, it is impossible to keep up." -- Lily Tomlin
What about people who inadvertently leave their cursor at a certain spot that happens to be a link while reading the results? It seems to me that this wouldn't produce very useful information.
Why? Are you making obscene gestures with it? Moving it up and down really rapidly?
Check out my world simulator thingy.
Good luck, a basic part of javascript ui coding is knowing where the mouse is.
Don't be evil... when people are watching.
Thanks Google, for the disclosure of this invention which society will be free to benefit from in 2030.
Some will say that the game is broken and Google is just obliged to play the game too, but in that case, they could make a promise not to use this patent aggressively. Since there's no such promise, all we can say is that they're stockpiling dangerous patents.
Expert in software patents or patent law? Contribute to the ESP wiki!
...is most people I know use their eyes instead of their mouse to see. Why would you need to move your mouse over to a certain part of the screen when you can just look there? Also, there's times where the mouse is just sitting in a portion of the screen idly, or sometimes people randomly move their mouse around to fulfill their OCD-ish needs (I'd know, I do that). A better alternative would simply be to see which links people end up clicking, which I'm pretty sure lots of search engines already do, and it works very well from what I've seen.
"Our country is not nearly so overrun with the bigoted as it is overrun with the broadminded." -Archbishop Fulton Sheen
Hellllloooooooooo NoScript.
Canada: The US's more awesome sibling.
This can be done right now in any browser unless you turn off or restrict JavaScript.
Michael J. Fox isn't worried about this patent.
I wiggle the mouse and randomly highlight text while I'm reading -- it used to confuse and baffle co-workers. Mostly it's just keeping my hand busy.
If they can infer anything meaningful from what is essentially doodling with the mouse, good luck with that. What I'm highlighting or hovering over has little to do with how they might be able to advertise to me. Heck, I think it would be funny to see the results.
And, I somewhat agree with the observations in TFA that there might be some privacy issues here. I already block google analytics on most of my machines.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Uh, Google is already doing that. Search suggestions, tracking the typing speed in form fields (they really do this, apparently so they can detect bots, but it opens up all of those possibilities)... They also see what link you click on their search results via background http request when you click it.
This is a story about patent abuse. There's a language and an environment which fires events based on other events. Now it turns out that actually using these features is so frapping ingenious that nobody but Google can do it for 20 years!
What is the difference between this and a keylogger?
It's one thing to record commands I have sent to their computers by clicking. It's another thing entirely to track things I do on MY computer. I foresee a lot of legislation in Google's future.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Great. Thank you, Google. Now i feel compelled to move my mouse erratically all of the time, only to be rewarded by advertisements about anything from tinfoil to dogfood.
Someone please quickly patent the tracking of the eye balls of the users, using one or more cameras, determine the part of the screen the user is looking at and throw even more targeted ad at them.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
He suffers from premature clicking. There's an app for that, but he's too embarrassed to buy it.
Remember to maintain your supply of
If I'm reading something, I move the mouse out of the way. So, if Google want to track what I'm interested in, they'll need to look at what the mouse is _not_ hovering over, or certainly not stopped over.
I've worked at two companies where we created libraries for monitoring cursor movement, what the business folks used it for I'm not certain but this has been done over and over. What is so new and innovative about their implementation that it is patentable?
I think the invisible hand of the market has its middle finger extended
--A wise old fart named SC0RN
I am all for more focused ads. I dream of the day i will get an advert for something i will actually buy.
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
If we weren't supposed to stroke men and women in ads then the cursor wouldn't change into the shape of a hand.
What am I supposed to do now?
it's under construction
Even with that, it's pretty easy for the rendering engine to know where the mouse is at any given moment (query the OS) and relate that back to the contents of the page. All without ever touching the code on the web page. That being said, reporting that information back to the web site or to Google directly would be pretty easy to spot.
Remember to maintain your supply of
We did it!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet_Cursor
24th Worst spyware evar was doing this more than ten years ago.
Help me Adblock Plus, you're my only hope.
Then again, if he clicks prematurely, he may have clicked the "buy now!" button before realising the embarrassement.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
But doing it that way would only work in Chrome, or would require users to install an extension of some kind (Google toolbar?).
It would also be much easier to block because I assume Google would be the only one using that functionality, and/or you could just uninstall the extension or use a different browser if it really bugs you.
Personally I don't really see what the issue is as long as they're just watching your mouse cursor on their pages.
I fully expect within the next two years all monitors will come equipped with a special extending boxing glove robot arm that will punch you in the face with advertisements. That way you have no option but to look as you get punched in the eye with an ad and you will never forget it.
I've worked at two companies where we created libraries for monitoring cursor movement, what the business folks used it for I'm not certain but this has been done over and over. What is so new and innovative about their implementation that it is patentable?
First, to say something is prior art, you have to read the claims of the patent, not the title of the Slashdot summary. For one, were your two companies providing search results and modifying the relevance of the results based on the cursor movement? Probably not.
Second, flip through the comments here on Slashdot:
Good luck with that
For me, it'll be incorrect data
The only problem with that...
Not accurate metrics.
Apparently, ordinary "skilled in the art" programmers and computer folks think that this method won't work, will have problems, will yield inaccurate metrics, etc. If people are saying something won't work, then it's seemingly obvious to them not to try it. The person who said the Wright brothers' machine could never fly probably didn't think that it was an obvious flying machine. Same thing here.
Apparently, the idea has some problems with it before it is a usable solution. If Google has solved those problems, then good for them!
Maybe that explains why I keep getting ads for green paint and nipple rings.
I have nothing compelling to say
Whatever. How long will I have to wait for someone to develop a plug-in for Firefox that blocks their ability to track that? I find the very idea of it extremely intrusive, almost Minority Report-esque.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
Chrome is safe. It has a plugin that lets you control it like Vim. No need for a mouse so start learning to surf the net like a man.
I usually move the cursor OUT of my vision so I can read better. I don't think that's going to be very helpful for them...
from snooping via this sort of BS too ... right?
It is trivially esy to avoid this sort of snooping: Use bing. Nobody forces you to use google as a search engine.
I dont read
Personally I don't really see what the issue is as long as they're just watching your mouse cursor on their pages.
Of course, but your depending on Google to limit it's use.
For me, I've switched to another search engine.
I wonder what they will make of my mouse movements. I tend to highlight text as I am reading as sort of a place holder.
If I were God, wouldn't I protect my churches from acts of me?
Of course they do.
Welcome to the art of Inverse Patents.
You patent the "sexy" form of the Patent concept, but you implement it 1-X. "Draw a burst radius around what you moved your mouse away from to read and correlate with subsequent clicks".
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
We wrote code to monitor mouse movements to detect click fraud years ago. However, we didn't deploy it for general use because it's a violation of the end-user's privacy - we only used it for pages and IPs that we suspected were either bots or paid-to-click.
So yes, by your mouse movement (not just the movement, but the timing) we could take specific advertisement-related actions.
I use PCs and laptops with touch screens.
I have no "mouse cursor" to track.
Since the light-pen was invented I've always felt the mouse is an
unnatural, less precise and inefficient pointing device.
I still prefer to navigate my OS & menus via keyboard (for speed).
Good luck with that soon to be obsolete patent as touch devices become cheap and commonplace.
Up Next: A patent on using the front facing camera and/or accelerometer of "touch devices" to track
actual eye and/or body movement (to make up for the devices' lack of a cursor).
In Soviet Russia, mouse tracks you.
The mind conceives, the body achieves, the spirit manifests.
It seems to me there is a wonderful opportunity here to do some data poisoning. A nice plugin to send Google as much false data and noise as possible, to reduce the value of this technology as close to zero as can be arranged. Identification of advertisers who knowingly use this information would be good too, to do a little "targeted" activity as a return favor. Nothing drastic or illegal, just boycotts and public shaming and attempts to poison their data caches too.
If they do this, my default search engine will be changed to Bing. It's a sad day when Microsoft becomes less evil than Google.
Google: Mouse-hovering does NOT imply consent to collect personally identifiable data. Facebook's "privacy" model is to be demonized, not emulated. You're being evil. Stop it.
Everybody gets what the majority deserves.
Tracking cursor movements is tantamount to an invasion of privacy. The only thing missing is a MAC address mouse with a biometric fingerprint scanner, that way the government can track your movements from the time you purchase the mouse to the time and place the mouse is installed and used. Talk about big brother.
P.S. I, slick7 do hereby claim the concept of a MAC address mouse (IPv4,IPv6,IPv8,IPV16,IPv32) with biometric fingerprint scanner on this date,27 July, 2010 at the time of 2059 GMT. This claim supercedes any claim after this date and time, so there you insensitive clod.
The mind conceives, the body achieves, the spirit manifests.
Someone put up a Flash porfolio about 10 years ago with loads of flash concepts and capabilities
one of those what to record the previous 10-20 vistors cursor movements. The screen had 9 boxes, each were clickable, but did nothing. after trying a few of them you would notice that nothing worked, then you could watch what the other visitors did before you.
In my experience, most of the users hover over a few before clicking on the top left box or middle box, while others seem to wonder or click hap hazardly.
I've always wanted to use this function as an over lay on any web site... to prove to the web site owner, they need to improve the site. "Look what your users are doing"
prior art. There are a lot more examples of it if you go looking.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
Since Apple-haters have completely taken over Slashdot (look at the article openly insulting all iPad users), I'm curious when opinions will turn on Google. Snooping on WiFi networks and archiving their data wasn't enough, CEO Eric Schmidt telling people concerned about privacy that they have something to hide wasn't enough...will tracking your mouse cursor be the final straw? I'm genuinely curious what it will take to push Slashdotters against Google. It's not as if this is an open source company--their primary businesses, search and advertising, are as closed source and proprietary as Windows.
Based on my own experience with when mousetips generally appear on a page, the first thing they're going to conclude is that ads placed between the body of an article and the scrollbar are by far the most effective. Near the scrollbar is where my mouse cursor spends most of its time. :)
Wouldn't this just be IntelliTXT, but to pop-up ads from hovering over other ads instead of from hovering over words on a page? So many talk about it here like it's new; it feels prior art-ish to me.
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
Sounds similar to TeaLeaf. We recently had a demo of Tealeaf to show how the web interface could be evaluated and improved. Tealeaf tracks all of the generated html a customer views. It can replay the exact experience from the customer's view point. Interesting stuff... I've also seen some of Omniture's software. It was able to show what a customer clicked on to navigate to a certain spot in the site.It also showed how often different parts were clicked on.
This type of software is good to determine what is being used, and what is waste, on a site.
Request a Linux Shockwave player here: http://www.macromedia.com/support/email/wishform/
Looks pretty much based on their experimental search called "Accessible View".
http://www.google.com/experimental/#Axs
The patent process has not only proven to be laughable, but completely ignorant of prior art. I'm gonna get a team of lawyers and apply for a patent on the enter key. Bwa-ha-ha!
When you're running NoScript, it won't matter if "anyone could do it" because when you arrive on anyone's page, it will NOT run the mouse-tracking script. For the tracking to work, you would have to turn on scripting on that new site.
All scripts are blocked except those URLs you have allowed in the past. A new page with its own script is blocked by default.
NoScript = No mouse tracking.
as bad as we say ad-targeting is, totally un-targeted ads are pure noise.
You say that like noise is a BAD thing. But noise is very much easier to ignore than someone calling out to you. So I say let 'em stay untargetted and ignorable.
I knew learning all those keyboard shortcuts would eventually pay off!
Serious prior use on this one. Would have to read this closer to make sure prior use exists, but I am pretty sure it does. In 2001, the owner of a company I contracted to requested that I track the location of a user's mouse every time it came to rest in order to improve the user experience on the website. It revealed some really interesting data that drove the design of the site. Furthermore, we started to use it to modify the search results based on user behavior. If someone hovered over a like sounding artist, but didn't click, we would compare that against what they ultimately selected and decide whether to display more of both or to eliminate the one they hovered over. Furthermore, that type of experience existed prior to then, as it wasn't even an original idea to the company's owner. He had picked it up from user experience testing when he worked at Microsoft in the 90s. Total prior use here, this should be denied.