It's a Targeted Targeted Targeted Targeted World

In a recent survey CNET asked AOL, Ask.com, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo about their privacy policies and behavioral targeting. In some cases they asked follow-up questions for clarification.

Here are the results



Source: http://news.com.com/How+search+engines+rate+on+privacy/2100-1029_3-6202068.html

So what did the Search engines say about Behavioral Targeting?

AOL was very open about using Behavioral Targeting. They have been using Revenue Science and recently purchased Revenue Science?s competitor Tacoda.

ASK said they do not use behavioral targeting. I have not paid much attention to ASK so I cannot comment if that is true or not.

ASK said they do not use behavioral targeting. I have not paid attention to ask so cannot comment if that is true or not.
Google said they do not use behavioral targeting. However as I engine.html">showed you last month, they use same session targeting, I call it behavioral targeting. Their following answers were not clear to me

"CNET: Do you do behavioral targeting, meaning showing ads to users based on their behavior across multiple queries?
Grand: We are committed to protecting user privacy. We also want to provide users with a more rewarding online experience by making the advertising and content users see relevant to them. We believe the targeting capabilities, reporting and analytics we offer today provide advertisers with an excellent ROI and provide a high-quality user experience. Currently, our system incorporates a large number of signals (such as the user's query, the user's location, type of site, content, and the advertiser's landing page) when targeting and ranking ads. We have not focused on demographic targeting to date for targeting ads on search result pages."

Isn?t that what is called behavioral targeting? Demographic is one element and is not the main ingredient for Behavioral Targeting, Behavioral Targeting is based on behavior, demographic provides another criteria to segment the behavior by but is not required. Once again, do not confuse Behavioral Targeting with targeting based on Demographic information. Seems like Google is saying since we do not use Demograohic information we are not doing Behavioral Targeting.

"CNET: We weren't able to figure out your answer to our question asking whether you do behavioral targeting. In other words, if I search for "New York City vacation" in one query and "vacation hotels" in a second query a moment later, does Google.com evaluate the two responses, figure out that I'm probably looking for New York City hotels, and display ads appropriately?
Grand (Google): No.
Well, I showed some examples of it last month, check out my article titled "engine.html">Ad Targeting on Google Search Engine".

MSN: Representative of MSN said that they offer Behavioral Targeting through AdCenter. He indicated that they will begin offering behavioral ad targeting on third-party sites. He also said that MSN uses some demographic data from services such as Hotmail and Windows Live for targeting but uses in non-identifiable fashion."

Yahoo, was very open about using behavioral targeting. According to yahoo
"Per our privacy policy, when a user is logged into a Yahoo product or service, they are not anonymous to us. Logged-in users may receive customized ads based on general demographic categories such as geo-location, gender, and/or age range."

What does this all mean?

Well, Behavioral Targeting has arrived, you will be targeted (and already are weather you know it or not). Yahoo, MSN and AOL are doing it. Google, even if they are denying it, is already targeting you. ASK will follow suite soon. "It's a Targeted Targeted Targeted Targeted World".

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Check in with Google Latitude

(Cross-posted on the Mobile Blog and LatLong Blog)

We first introduced Google Latitude to help you stay in touch with your friends and family by making it easy to share where you are. For the 10 million people actively using Latitude each month, this ?where? has been a location on a map. Starting today in Google Maps 5.1 for Android, you can also connect that location to a real place by checking in there using Latitude.

Connecting your location with places
You can still use Latitude to automatically update and share your location, but check-ins let you add context to the location?like captions to a photo. For example, I live in San Francisco but often travel around the world. Until today, sharing my location let friends and family know if I was across the globe or in their neighborhood. Now, check-ins let them see the cool restaurant I?m trying in Taipei or join me for a latte at the cafe nearby.

See where your friends are on a map and where they?re checking in.

Not your typical check-ins
Because you can use Latitude to automatically detect your location, we?ve added a few twists to checking in to make it really easy:

• Notifications: Turn on check-in notifications in Latitude?s settings and get a notification to check in at a nearby place once you arrive. Never forget to check in again.
• Automatic check-ins: Choose to automatically check in at specific places you designate, and you?ll be checked in when you?re there. You can talk to friends or finish your bagel without fumbling with your phone.
• Check out: Once you leave, Latitude knows to automatically check you out of places so friends aren?t left guessing if you?re still there.

Explore your world one check-in at a time
Latitude is built right into Google Maps for Android so check-ins work across Latitude and Maps seamlessly. For example, check in at that new hamburger joint, and you?ll see its Place page with reviews to help you order. When friends check in at a place, you can go straight from their Latitude profile to its Place page to learn about it, fire up Google Maps Navigation (Beta) for turn-by-turn directions to them, and more.

You can also check in at a favorite place to earn special status there; you?ll see if you?ve become a ?Regular,? a ?VIP? or a ?Guru? on its Place page. Keep checking in to hold onto your status or reach the next level.

Latitude check-ins are built right into Google Maps and Place pages.

Of course, we thought carefully about how to make checking in to places quick and easy while giving you control over your privacy. Just like when sharing your location with Latitude, checking in is 100% opt-in, and you can choose to share any check-in with your friends on Latitude, publicly on the web and your Google profile, or just yourself. Learn more about checking in and managing your check-ins with Latitude in the Help Center. Coming later this week, you?ll also be able to see your complete history of check-ins using the optional History tab at google.com/latitude from your computer.

Choose options for individual check-ins or turn on and off notifications in the Latitude settings.

Start checking in by downloading the latest Google Maps from Android Market (on Android 1.6+; tap here if you're on your phone) and then joining Latitude from the main menu. You can check in everywhere Maps and Latitude are already available. If you?re using the new Latitude app for iPhone, you?ll see your friends? check-ins, and we?ll update the app soon so you can check in too.

Just the beginning...
Checking in from Latitude is just one step in helping you connect the places you go with the people you care about. We believe in letting you use or share your location however you like, and we?re working on making location and check-ins useful in more places?across Google and the web.

Posted by Joe LaPenna, Software Engineer, Google Latitude Team

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Tech for good - catching up on Google.org

Google.org continues to ramp up technology projects and test new ideas while Google?s overall charitable giving, in-kind giving and employee volunteering have grown as well. Our newsletter outlines the latest updates to our philanthropic projects. I caught up with Megan Smith, VP New Business Development and General Manager of Google.org, to talk about how Google views philanthropy.

After two years at the helm of Google.org, what are you most optimistic about?
The Internet offers an opportunity to connect in ways never before possible. Things that have historically been far apart are now ?virtually adjacent??most people are a text away, data sets can be mashed up, and all world knowledge is coming online from both expected and surprising sources. Given all of this, I am most excited about all the extraordinary ways people are using the web to connect, be informed, use data and to start solving problems together.

For Google.org specifically, we want to contribute our knowledge and skills to help use technology to address humanity?s greatest challenges. We now have more than 50 engineers and about 40 other cross-functional Googlers working on four or five larger projects?like Google Crisis Response and RE<C?and over a dozen smaller experimental pilot projects.

What kind of project fits this opportunity?
One of our newer projects, Google Earth Engine, takes advantage of Google?s computing infrastructure to create a planetary sciences computation platform that could help reduce negative environmental impact at scale. The first focus is on deforestation monitoring. Earth Engine has just made it through the pilot phase to a full project with its launch last month at climate change talks in Mexico. If we meet our goals to enable global-scale monitoring of changes in the planet?s environment, I believe that Earth Engine could play an important information role in helping to slow deforestation.

What?s the biggest lesson you?ve learned since joining Google.org?
Two things: first, the opportunity we have is great; and second, the work has served as a reminder that creating truly useful, innovative technology is challenging and requires patient iteration, dialog, teamwork and creativity. It takes time to gather new ideas, learn from the right partners, collaborate, pilot those ideas that pass initial assessment and then launch for scale the few projects that meet the criteria for a Google.org product.

Do Google.org projects have a specific focus?
We don?t have a topical focus?we work on technology solutions to many different kinds of global challenges. The key is to take advantage of Google?s strengths. In the area of global health, for example, we have been able to create a global flu monitoring system based on search data. For our environmental work, we were able to leverage our data center computing power to put together the finest-scale forest map of Mexico to date (processing this data would take two years on one computer, but we made it in less than 24 hours using our computing infrastructure).

How does Google.org start and ramp up its technology projects?
We work to tap into the talent at Google. Some projects have come out of hallway conversations and others from extensive talks with partners in the field. Formally, we have a bimonthly new initiatives meeting with senior engineers where talented individuals or teams within Google bring ideas or prototypes. If we think the idea is a match and has promise, we give it budget, headcount, guidance and time to see where it can go during a pilot period. Once we have a live pilot or project, we take advantage of Google.com?s standard project review and management processes that our company has effectively used for years.

What if those pilots fail?
That?s normal. We should expect that some of them will fail or will only have smaller impact. If you?re not failing some of the time, you?re not taking risks. As we progress, some of our failures will hopefully teach us as much as some of our successes.

What other charitable giving does Google do?
As a company that has been doing well, it?s important that we push ourselves to be amongst the most generous companies. We have several charitable giving programs supporting, for example, education (especially K-12 science and math programs), university research, communities where we work, and technology solutions for underserved groups. Last year the company gave more than $145 million to non-profits and academic institutions, and more than $184 million when including Google Grants, Google.org technology projects and in-kind product support for non-profits.

How is this philanthropic work different from that of other companies?
Like other companies, we have charitable giving programs, we provide products in-kind and we have a range of employee volunteering programs. Some companies like ours may also have experiments like Google.org to leverage their strengths?a form of skills-based giving. However, many companies do amazing charitable work through a centralized Corporate Social Responsibility arm that tackles a key issue or two. We approach philanthropy the way we do our core business, with big goals and a ?launch early and iterate? approach. Ideas come from all over the company and we work to tackle a range of issues we care about, from clean energy to education to development. It may not be as clean as the process that some others have, but we think this is how we can have the most impact.

We remain determined, as our founders said when they set the vision for Google.org, "to find original ways to extend our assets, so that we can drive scalable, sustainable efforts. ...the underlying principle: Never stop looking for ways to do the best with what you have."

Posted by Urs Hölzle, Senior Vice President, Operations

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Some weekend work that will (hopefully) enable more Egyptians to be heard

Like many people we?ve been glued to the news unfolding in Egypt and thinking of what we could do to help people on the ground. Over the weekend we came up with the idea of a speak-to-tweet service?the ability for anyone to tweet using just a voice connection.

We worked with a small team of engineers from Twitter, Google and SayNow, a company we acquired last week, to make this idea a reality. It?s already live and anyone can tweet by simply leaving a voicemail on one of these international phone numbers (+16504194196 or +390662207294 or +97316199855) and the service will instantly tweet the message using the hashtag #egypt. No Internet connection is required. People can listen to the messages by dialing the same phone numbers or going to twitter.com/speak2tweet.

We hope that this will go some way to helping people in Egypt stay connected at this very difficult time. Our thoughts are with everyone there.

Update Feb 1, 12:47 PM: When possible, we're now detecting the approximate (country-level) geographic origin of each call dialing one of our speak2tweet numbers and attaching a hashtag for that country to each tweet. For example, if a call comes from Switzerland, you'll see #switzerland in the tweet, and if one comes from Egypt you'll see #egypt. For calls when we can't detect the location, we default to an #egypt hashtag.

Posted by Ujjwal Singh, CoFounder of SayNow and AbdelKarim Mardini, Product Manager, Middle East & North Africa

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Explore museums and great works of art in the Google Art Project

One of the things I love about working at Google is that you can come up with an idea one day and the next day start getting to work to make it a reality. That's what happened with the Art Project?a new tool we're announcing today which puts more than 1,000 works of art at your fingertips, in extraordinary detail.

It started when a small group of us who were passionate about art got together to think about how we might use our technology to help museums make their art more accessible?not just to regular museum-goers or those fortunate to have great galleries on their doorsteps, but to a whole new set of people who might otherwise never get to see the real thing up close.

We're also lucky here to have access to technology like Picasa and App Engine and to have colleagues who love a challenge?like building brand-new technology to enable Street View to go indoors! Thanks to this, and our unique collaboration with museums around the world, we were able to turn our 20% project into something you can try out for yourself today at www.googleartproject.com.

You?ll find a selection of super high-resolution images of famous works of art as well as more than a thousand other images, by more than 400 artists?all in one place. And with Street View technology, you can take a virtual tour inside 17 of the world?s most acclaimed art museums, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art and MoMA in New York, The State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Tate Britain & The National Gallery in London, Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid, the Uffizi Gallery in Florence and Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.

Officer and Laughing Girl, Johannes Vermeer (The Frick Collection, New York - U.S.)

Here are a few things you can do:

• Dive into brushstroke-level detail: On top of the 1,000+ other images, each of the 17 museums selected one artwork to be photographed in extraordinary detail using super high resolution or ?gigapixel? photo-capturing technology. Each of these images contains around 7 billion pixels?that's that?s around 1,000 times more detailed than your average digital camera?and a specially-built ?microscope view? uses Picasa to deliver these images at amazingly high resolution. You can zoom in to see Van Gogh?s famous brushwork or watch how previously hard to-see elements of an artwork suddenly become clear?such as the tiny Latin couplet which appears in Hans Holbein the Younger?s ?The Merchant Georg Gisze.?

The bedroom, Vincent van Gogh (Van Gogh Museum)

• Explore inside the museums: the Street View team designed a brand-new vehicle called the ?trolley? to take 360-degree images of the interior of selected galleries. These were then stitched together and mapped to their location, enabling smooth navigation of more than 385 rooms within the museums. We also created a new clickable annotation feature, so you can jump from being inside a museum one moment to viewing a particular artwork the next. Once inside an image, an info panel lets you read more about an artwork, find more works by that artist and watch related YouTube videos. Gallery interiors can also be explored directly from within Street View in Google Maps.

Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Italy?with a view on Botticelli?s ?The Birth of Venus?

• Create your own collection: With the ?Create an Artwork Collection? feature, you can save specific views of any of the artworks and build your own personalized collection. Comments can be added to each painting and the whole collection can then be shared with friends, family or on the web using the integrated goo.gl URL shortener.

We?re incredibly excited about this project?it?s our first step toward making great art more accessible, and we hope to add more museums and works of art in time. So whether you?re a student, an aspiring artist or a casual museum-goer, we hope the Google Art Project gives you a fun and unusual way to interact with art?and hopefully inspires you to visit the real thing.

Posted by Amit Sood, Head of Google Art Project

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Microsoft’s Bing uses Google search results—and denies it

By now, you may have read Danny Sullivan?s recent post: ?Google: Bing is Cheating, Copying Our Search Results? and heard Microsoft?s response, ?We do not copy Google's results.? However you define copying, the bottom line is, these Bing results came directly from Google.

I?d like to give you some background and details of our experiments that lead us to understand just how Bing is using Google web search results.

It all started with tarsorrhaphy. Really. As it happens, tarsorrhaphy is a rare surgical procedure on eyelids. And in the summer of 2010, we were looking at the search results for an unusual misspelled query [torsorophy]. Google returned the correct spelling?tarsorrhaphy?along with results for the corrected query. At that time, Bing had no results for the misspelling. Later in the summer, Bing started returning our first result to their users without offering the spell correction (see screenshots below). This was very strange. How could they return our first result to their users without the correct spelling? Had they known the correct spelling, they could have returned several more relevant results for the corrected query.

This example opened our eyes, and over the next few months we noticed that URLs from Google search results would later appear in Bing with increasing frequency for all kinds of queries: popular queries, rare or unusual queries and misspelled queries. Even search results that we would consider mistakes of our algorithms started showing up on Bing.

We couldn?t shake the feeling that something was going on, and our suspicions became much stronger in late October 2010 when we noticed a significant increase in how often Google?s top search result appeared at the top of Bing?s ranking for a variety of queries. This statistical pattern was too striking to ignore. To test our hypothesis, we needed an experiment to determine whether Microsoft was really using Google?s search results in Bing?s ranking.

We created about 100 ?synthetic queries??queries that you would never expect a user to type, such as [hiybbprqag]. As a one-time experiment, for each synthetic query we inserted as Google?s top result a unique (real) webpage which had nothing to do with the query. Below is an example:


To be clear, the synthetic query had no relationship with the inserted result we chose?the query didn?t appear on the webpage, and there were no links to the webpage with that query phrase. In other words, there was absolutely no reason for any search engine to return that webpage for that synthetic query. You can think of the synthetic queries with inserted results as the search engine equivalent of marked bills in a bank.

We gave 20 of our engineers laptops with a fresh install of Microsoft Windows running Internet Explorer 8 with Bing Toolbar installed. As part of the install process, we opted in to the ?Suggested Sites? feature of IE8, and we accepted the default options for the Bing Toolbar.

We asked these engineers to enter the synthetic queries into the search box on the Google home page, and click on the results, i.e., the results we inserted. We were surprised that within a couple weeks of starting this experiment, our inserted results started appearing in Bing. Below is an example: a search for [hiybbprqag] on Bing returned a page about seating at a theater in Los Angeles. As far as we know, the only connection between the query and result is Google?s result page (shown above).


We saw this happen for multiple queries. For the query [delhipublicschool40 chdjob] we inserted a search result for a credit union:

The same credit union soon showed up on Bing for that query:


For the query [juegosdeben1ogrande] we inserted a page of hip hop bling jewelry:


And the same hip hop bling page showed up in Bing:


As we see it, this experiment confirms our suspicion that Bing is using some combination of:

• Internet Explorer 8, which can send data to Microsoft via its Suggested Sites feature
• the Bing Toolbar, which can send data via Microsoft?s Customer Experience Improvement Program

or possibly some other means to send data to Bing on what people search for on Google and the Google search results they click. Those results from Google are then more likely to show up on Bing. Put another way, some Bing results increasingly look like an incomplete, stale version of Google results?a cheap imitation.

At Google we strongly believe in innovation and are proud of our search quality. We?ve invested thousands of person-years into developing our search algorithms because we want our users to get the right answer every time they search, and that?s not easy. We look forward to competing with genuinely new search algorithms out there?algorithms built on core innovation, and not on recycled search results from a competitor. So to all the users out there looking for the most authentic, relevant search results, we encourage you to come directly to Google. And to those who have asked what we want out of all this, the answer is simple: we'd like for this practice to stop.

Posted by Amit Singhal, Google Fellow

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Google Hotpot now on Google.com and around the world

(Cross-posted on LatLong Blog and Hotpot Blog)

Back in November, we introduced Hotpot, a new local recommendation engine powered by you and your friends. Using Hotpot is simple: you rate places on google.com/hotpot?restaurants, hotels, cafes?and add friends on Hotpot whose opinions you trust. Then the next time you perform a search, Google will serve up personalized results, listing places based on your tastes, as well as recommendations from your friends.

We?ve watched Hotpot grow and change over the last couple months, and today Hotpot is really going places: to a Google search box near you and around the world.

You can now enjoy Hotpot recommendations in your regular search results on Google.com. So say you?re looking for a restaurant in Barcelona. Go to Google and search [restaurant barcelona]. If a friend has rated a particular restaurant, you might see their rating and what they had to say about it?as well as their name and photo?directly beneath that restaurant?s listing. To see all recommendations by your friends, click ?Places? on the lefthand side of the page, and choose ?Friends only.? Remember, you?ll need to be logged in to your Google account in order to see recommendations.

Seeing place recommendations based on your tastes and those of your friends across more Google searches will make results more relevant to you and maybe lead you to discover a new gem. If you don?t have Hotpot friends yet, you can invite them to share all the places they love with you by using the ?Friends? tab on google.com/hotpot.

But Hotpot will only be half the fun if you can?t share it with all your international friends. So starting today, we?re making Hotpot available in 38 new languages?including Chinese, French, German, Italian, Korean, Polish, Russian and Spanish?allowing people to share their favorite places in their native language.

Start rating and sharing recommendations with Hotpot everywhere, anytime: at google.com/hotpot, on Google Maps, using Google Maps for Android with an easy widget, and on our new iPhone app.

Happy rating!

Posted by Lior Ron, Product Manager

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