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.
Good luck, a basic part of javascript ui coding is knowing where the mouse is.
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.
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...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
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.
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.
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
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!
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
People have done this and got bored with it 2 years ago or more.
If you had RTFP, you'd know that Google's patent application was initially filed in Dec., 2004. That's a little over 2 years ago in case you couldn't figure it out.
In Soviet Russia, mouse tracks you.
The mind conceives, the body achieves, the spirit manifests.
You’re missing the point. As long as you have some sort of “hover” action, this applies – in fact, since useful information is often hidden until you mouse-over something, hardware designers are constantly trying to find better ways of implementing hover on touch interfaces.
Go check out Google’s new-and-improved image search results page for a perfect example of this sort of thing. They’ve completely done away with the text surrounding each image – hovering over one of the results for a moment enlarges it and reveals the associated text (URL and text blurb from the page containing it).
In other words, for example, if you perform a search and hover the mouse over all the pr0n on the first page to get a better look, page 2 is going to be dynamically re-sorted to give you more pr0n, and the advertisements will change to ads for adult websites.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
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.