I've seen the claim that the +1 button tracks you in a lot of places, and as one of the people responsible for making it not track you [I work for Google], I'd like to understand better why this claim persists. Thanks!
Sure, we can interview a handful of people, hundreds or even thousands, but that's not very helpful for figuring out what ads people want to see. By and large, people don't think about how they search; they just do it. It's part of life. If we ask someone to think about it, they'll say something, and it might be very interesting. But it won't help us do the right thing when they _aren't_ thinking about it.
So as a complement to interviewing, to get more useful data, we see where people click.
And no, I'm not going to respond to other sarcastic replies.:-)
He sent us the number of characters (?) on our homepage, whatever it was, just to let us know someone was watching.:-) And yes, we thought about it and decided he had a point. People want their Google fast, so that's how we'll serve it up.
Lots of us work pretty hard to try to figure out what users want to see. It's not easy, since we can't actually interview users, but we listen very attentively to the data to find out what people are "saying."
I'm the product manager responsible for the way ads look on Google. You will not be distracted by image ads or video ads on Google search results pages. Period.
Just because other companies use image ads and video ads with the _purpose_ of distracting users doesn't mean Google will do that. Images and videos can be useful and entertaining, if you see them when you want to see them. It's taken us a long time to figure out how to do it right.
BTW, how many _years_ do we have to be in business before people learn Google isn't motivated by short-term greed? Yes, we want to make money. We want to make money 10 years from now. The only way to do that is to build great products that people want. I think we've done a pretty good job of that so far, and we're not planning to stop.
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Ever since Google decided to track me through Google+ +1 buttons added to every page I browse, I've had to remove google.com from my whitelist.
How do you reconcile your statement with Google's stated policy on what the +1 button tracks: http://support.google.com/plus/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1319578 ?
I've seen the claim that the +1 button tracks you in a lot of places, and as one of the people responsible for making it not track you [I work for Google], I'd like to understand better why this claim persists. Thanks!
Sure, we can interview a handful of people, hundreds or even thousands, but that's not very helpful for figuring out what ads people want to see. By and large, people don't think about how they search; they just do it. It's part of life. If we ask someone to think about it, they'll say something, and it might be very interesting. But it won't help us do the right thing when they _aren't_ thinking about it.
:-)
So as a complement to interviewing, to get more useful data, we see where people click.
And no, I'm not going to respond to other sarcastic replies.
He sent us the number of characters (?) on our homepage, whatever it was, just to let us know someone was watching. :-) And yes, we thought about it and decided he had a point. People want their Google fast, so that's how we'll serve it up.
Lots of us work pretty hard to try to figure out what users want to see. It's not easy, since we can't actually interview users, but we listen very attentively to the data to find out what people are "saying."
I'm the product manager responsible for the way ads look on Google. You will not be distracted by image ads or video ads on Google search results pages. Period.
Just because other companies use image ads and video ads with the _purpose_ of distracting users doesn't mean Google will do that. Images and videos can be useful and entertaining, if you see them when you want to see them. It's taken us a long time to figure out how to do it right.
BTW, how many _years_ do we have to be in business before people learn Google isn't motivated by short-term greed? Yes, we want to make money. We want to make money 10 years from now. The only way to do that is to build great products that people want. I think we've done a pretty good job of that so far, and we're not planning to stop.
I'm looking forward to seeing the videos of all the sexy /.ers
You mean both of us?