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.
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