Google to Keep Personal Search History

Marrisa Mayer, vice president of search division, Google, said in an interview that google might think keeping search data for more than 18 months if the user consents. The search giant now destroys the personal search history after 18 months. The web titan now saves the user search history in order to analyze search pattern and output more accurate results. But privacy advocates have questioned the authority of google to retain private data.

Speaking at a press event in Paris, France, Ms Mayer said

"Personalized search tracks and shows you in your search history the clicks and trends of your searches. Based on what we see as your searching pattern it ultimately can enhance your result. There's a simple way to turn it on and off. We will only use the data that a user gives us to target personalized search."

As google destroys the history it again needs to start from scratch to produce more accurate result for the person.

She said: "We have declared that we keep our records of searches for 18 months. We think that this was a good compromise and also something which benefited our users. Eighteen months is sufficient to do a good job of personalizing so we think that personalized search will continue and will be successful. At the same time it protects our users' privacy as we anonymise the logs after 18 months."

In this context one can unarguably say that google has already mastered the art of producing near to very near close match as per one's expectation. And now they want to move beyond that by introducing what to be called 'hyper-personal' search. Speaking about future plan of google Eric Schmidt, the firm's chief executive, said one day the search engine could potentially answer questions such as "What shall I do tomorrow?" and "Which college should I go to?".

"Google is not at all done with your information problems. There are many, many examples of where it would be nice if Google had more of an ability to understand time and choices.

"It will be some years before we can at least partially answer those questions. But the eventual outcome is... that Google can answer a more hypothetical question."

He added: "The important principle and I want to say this over and over again, is that this is opt-in, user choice."

Ms Mayer while explaining the biggest hurdle google face now, said, "In the early days of the internet you could actually offer search results as a list, and organize them by hand. But as you include more and more information, relevance and ranking gets harder. We have continually tried to improve our speed and that speed has yielded more and more searches. Our goal is to have a Google search as fast as a light beam to and from our data centers from your location."

Google already produces billions of results in terms of output volume and the figure is three times the result produced by its nearest result. With hyper-personal search google is now eyeing to produce what exactly one is looking for and not how many it can return.

Source:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6221256.stm
http://www.google.com/history/welcome?hl=en&zx=OnPzBG5j36w
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/low/technology/6221256.stm

Author: BBC Correspondent