Posted by Hal Varian, Chief Economist (Cross-posted from Official Google Blog ) treat user data and protect privacy . With the post below, we're beginning an occasional series that discusses how we harness the data we collect to improve our products and services for our users. We think it's appropriate to start with a post describing how data has been critical to the advancement of search technology. - Ed.A brief history of search Text Retrieval Conference (TREC) in 1992. TREC introduced new data in the form of full-text documents and used human judges to classify whether or not particular documents were relevant to a set of queries. They released a sample of this data to researchers, who used it to train and improve their systems to find the documents relevant to a new set of queries and compare their results to TREC's human judgments and other researchers' algorithms.PageRank How Google uses data Wall Street Journal , New York Times , and the House of Representatives, that carries more weight than 20 links from my old college buddies who happen to have web pages.constantly experimenting with our algorithm, tuning and tweaking on a weekly basis to come up with more relevant and useful results for our users.videos to see exactly what data we store in our logs.) What results do people click on? How does their behavior change when we change aspects of our algorithm? Using data in the logs, we can compare how well we're doing now at finding useful information for you to how we did a year ago. If we don't keep a history, we have no good way to evaluate our progress and make improvements.
You really should separate cookies from different services. I have a Firefox account for simple browsing where I don't let Google set a cookie (which breaks the image search for "unsafe"), an account for Gmail/Reader/etc, and one where I let everything set cookies which get deleted on browser close. If you care about user privacy, why don't you separate your services? Even if I wanted to let you set cookies for everything, I wouldn't want to use my Gmail account to post to Blogger. I'd have to log out of one and into the other, and back out again. It's very annoying!
ReplyDeleteI have a Firefox account for simple browsing where I don't let Google set a cookie (which breaks the image search for "unsafe"), an account for Gmail/Reader/etc, and one where I let everything set cookies which get deleted on browser close. If laptop batteries you care about user privacy, why don't you separate your services? Even if I wanted to let you set cookies for everything, I wouldn't want to use my Gmail account to post to Blogger. I'd have to log out of one and into the other, and back out again.
ReplyDelete