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Google Switching to SSL By Default For Logged-In Users
nonprofiteer writes "Google plans to encrypt search for signed-in users, so that websites will no longer get to see the search terms that led a user to their site, though they will get aggregated reports on the top 1000 search terms that led traffic to their sites."
This will break those sites that automatically generate content based on your search query.
Is this going to be considered good because it helps protect our privacy from the websites? Or bad because Google is effectively monetizing the private information by keeping the details to themselves (and using it?) while only handing out aggregate data to everyone else? I can see arguments being made either way.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
You are the product.
Google isn't doing it offer better privacy. It's doing it cause trouble for competing services. It basically requires all website owners to sign up with Google to access Analytics and Webmaster Tools. It's purely an anti-competitive thing and intented to destroy their compteitors. I'd be surprised if FCC doesn't start to crack on Google's monopoly tactics soon. Google is the new Microsoft.
This is particularly beneficial to all the hapless people who think using open wifi is perfectly safe. And it saves Google from having to deal with stolen accounts as a result. That's why it's so popular on places like Twitter and Facebook, too.
That's not to say that SSL is perfect, and a hapless user can still be tricked or spied upon once somebody starts ARP spoofing'em or SSL stripping or what have you. But some protection is better than none.
They are able to charge a premium for that targeted advertising because other people selling products feel they are getting better bang for their buck (as opposed to blanket advertising on television, or spam/UCE) due to the higher conversion rates.
It's actually more direct than that.
The vast majority of Google's advertising revenue comes from pay-per-click advertising, and the ad that is shown is selected based both on your likely interests and on a real-time auction among advertisers. So, Google's goal is to put in front of you the highest-paying ad that you are likely to find sufficiently interesting that you click on it. More precisely, you can think of each possible ad you could see as having an expected value to Google, which is determined by the amount the advertiser will pay Google if you click on it times the probability that you will click on it, and Google's goal is to display the ads with the highest expected value.
Thus, the more Google knows about who you are and what you're looking for right now, the better job it can do at estimating the click probability function for each ad.
From Google's perspective, this is a win-win-win. It's a win for Google, obviously, because it's the way they make the most money. It's a win for the winning advertiser because the advertiser got an interested (at least enough to click) person to their site, for a price that's a little less than what they offered to pay -- plus Google also provides advertisers with extensive feedback that helps them optimize the effectiveness of their ads and even their site (but doesn't share any user info). Finally, it's a win for the user because it provides ads about things that are interesting and useful to him/her.
In Google's view, if Google shows you an ad that you don't click on, that's a failure. That means Google fails most of the time, but really hard problems are like that. It also means that it's better to display no ads than ads that the user won't care about. If Google were able to do its job perfectly, you'd click on every single ad Google shows you, and proceed to buy from each advertiser -- and you'd be happy about it because in each case you found just what you were looking for.
The perhaps non-obvious implication of all of this is that users are not Google's product. Not from Google's perspective. Rather, advertisers and users are both customers, and Google maximizes its income by serving both effectively, by pointing users towards products they actually want to buy. The service Google sells is a sort of digital matchmaking service, and while it's the advertisers who pay Google, the users are at least as important -- since they're the ones who ultimately pay the bills.
At least that's true for pay-per-click advertising. Google does do some pay-per-impression advertising, and that's different. In the pay-per-impression model the goal is to build brand recognition or to steer consumer perception, and there the user is definitely the product. That's a pretty small piece of Google's business, though.
(Disclaimer: I work for Google, but not in anything ad-related, and everything I've said above is public knowledge.)
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