Search Engines are Customising Your Results by Internet History

January 28th, 2010 by Geoff

Search Engines have now started to base your search results on your internet History – Are they going to far and invading our privacy?

This development by the Search engines has come to light recently and the reason for this is to get a better understanding of how users navigate around the Internet. The likes of Google, Yahoo and Bing have started to use internet user’s history to “improve search results”. Do we really want to share our personal searches with huge companies whose main goal at the end of the day is to generate more revenue?

This data that we put into the engines gets stored by them, could they potentially sell this private information to other advertisers? It has to be considered that this is the case, search engines want to make as much profit as possible so selling this kind of information will increase their revenue. Online advertisers will start to seek personal information from the engines, to target you as the customer, to increase sales or revenue.

An Example
This is starting to invade on our privacy and search engines have crossed the line. For example, if you searched “bad credit” because you were trying to give advise to a family member on their finances. Now with this customized search you will start to see ads relating to “bad credit” even though this is not a topic that you are no longer interested in. This is a an extreme case and in many circumstances this will not happen. Does this mean we have to be wary of the information that we put into search engines?. Therefore the experience you have when using them will be compromised.

If you are starting to become aware of engines using this information to “improve search results” and want to stop this from happening, simply make sure that web history is turned off so information cannot be stored.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 28th, 2010 at 9:19 am .

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS feed.

Link to us

If you want to link to this blog, copy and paste the following HTML code to your website.

Get Involved

MAY 21

How Google's Rolling Index Affects Your SEO

There are a few common mistakes that people new to SEO often make. Being relatively new to search engine optimisation myself, I try to avoid commenting on these issues unless I'm fully confident about the advice I'm giv...
MAY 19

Make Guest Blogging work for you

Quality content is crucial to search engine optimisation — if you've been reading this SEO blog for any time, you will know that I have tried to reinforce this point at every possible opportunity. One area I haven't cov...

MAY 15

Twitter Vows to Work Closer With UK policymakers

With over 10million users in the UK and a somewhat eventful 12 months behind it, Twitter have finally agreed to work more closely with Government and policymakers in the UK. The Social Network currently has over 140million user...
MAY 14

Content Techniques to Improve SEO and Sales

Following the recent Panda and Penguin updates recently, the content written for websites has become more of a focus; being more relevant and of better quality. Google is penalising content which is full of keywords to the point o...

"We've long been considering an SEO campaign and have researched the benefits that it could potentially bring to our web presence," commented 3663 Catering Equipment's Managing Director Paul Knight. "The team at Click Consult put together a very attractive package and we're pleased to be able to enter into a sound business partnership with them. We're looking forward to seeing the results they can provide for the 3663 Catering Equipment website moving forward."

3663

Managing Director - 3663 Catering

"We have been working with Click Consult for over a year now. We are delighted with the increase in unique visitors to our site and they have far exceeded our conversion KPI metrics for customer database registrations. We rank in the top 3 for all keywords that we asked Click Consult to optimize for us. This agency know how to produce results."

hills pets

Managing Director - Liverpool One

"Whilst we have a long term keyword strategy, Click Consult have a good appreciation of our business and have a flexible approach to implementing short term keyword strategies to coincide with the peaks of the retail calendar. I receive a monthly performance report from Click Consult detailing the relevant data I require but in addition, I can review the work being undertaken at any time by logging in to their bespoke reporting system."

hills pets

CRM Manager - Liverpool One

"Hills has been looking for an agency that is able to quickly deliver in the search marketing area and catapult EMEA websites ahead of the competition. Taking SEO Consult for this project turned out to be a smart choice. Not only have they managed to significantly increase search engine traffic to our websites, but they also come with innovative ideas that can be turned to reality. I can simply say they deliver. And it's always a pleasure talking to them."

hills pets

Managing Director - Hills Pets

Request A Free Website Analysis