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123webguru News Desk
With Its Home Page, Google Could Get a Bit Closer to Its Users
WILL Internet users get personal with Google?
The company began testing a service last week that lets users build a customized Google home page filled with news, stock quotes and other features that crowd similar pages on popular portals like Yahoo and MSN.
As part of this effort, Google is offering headline feeds from a narrow selection of information sites like BBC News and, in the future, it will allow users to add feeds from their favorite sites. The customized pages can also list local movies and weather, stock market quotes and driving directions, and can display a preview of a user's in-box from Google's Gmail service.
The service gives Google another potential entry point in the battle to deliver ads tailored to a user's stated or implied tastes or product searches - ads that marketers have been willing to pay far more for than they do for standard banners displayed to everyone who visits a site.
Google says it has no immediate plans to display advertisements based on, say, the user's location or clicking habits while using the service, but analysts say that such a move is not necessary, at least in the near future, for the company to capitalize on it.
"This is all about getting better search results, to keep people coming back to the site," said Charlene Li, an analyst with Forrester Research. "Right now, Google knows nothing about their users. But if they can get the user's permission for this, and give them better search results based on what stories they've read or e-mails they've gotten on the site in the past, that's where it pays off." In that respect, Ms. Li said, the personalized pages are closely aligned with another recent Google initiative, My Search History, which, with the user's permission, keeps a record of previous Google queries in an effort to deliver better search results.
Web search ads from Google, Yahoo and others represented baby steps in the direction of personalized advertising, giving marketers the means to reach prospective customers when they searched for words related to the company's products. But those ads only go so far, because Internet users who type in "Ford trucks," for instance, could be history buffs, not prospective buyers.
Google's new approach could help marketers solve that problem, by following the logic of both users' reading habits and searches on the site. If users add a feed of car reviews to their home page, and swap e-mail messages with friends about buying a new truck, for instance, Google's search results could be customized to focus on that activity. Car manufacturers, meanwhile, would be far more interested in reaching those searchers, and would likely bid higher for the right to show them ads.
The idea that Google would be analyzing the content of e-mail messages to place relevant ads next to them sparked controversy when the Gmail service was introduced. The service's privacy policy indicates that the ads are chosen based on keywords found in the currently displayed message, not on past messages. The home page effort follows closely on the heels of another Google project, the Web Accelerator, which could help it deliver highly personalized ads in the future. With that service, which the company began testing earlier this month, users download software that stores copies of popular Web pages, or pages the user repeatedly visits, on their own computers.
When users type in the address of one of those pages, it loads instantly, because it does not have to travel over the Internet to get to the computer. Because Accelerator tracks the user's surfing activity, it could be used to discern potential commercial interests and display relevant ads, perhaps in tandem with the home page service. Marissa Mayer, Google's director of consumer Web products, said the company had no immediate plans to commercialize the Accelerator service, or any of the other services that track a user's behavior.
"Thinking long term, my gut sense is that, yes, there will be a search engine that knows more about me and as a result does a better job than Google does today," Ms. Mayer said. "It's my hope that that search engine is us, but it's a further-reaching thing." But trends in the marketplace suggest that advertisers could put increasing pressure on the company to offer such services sooner. Claria, formerly known as the Gator Corporation, earlier this month said that it was developing a service that would allow any site to offer personalized Web pages, using their own content or that of other publishers.
With that service, called PersonalWeb, a site like Yahoo could allow its visitors to receive material from various online publishers or from within a publisher's site, without forcing them to be specific about which articles and sources they want to see. Instead, the service would track the users' surfing habits and automatically generate pages that reflected what they typically read. Ads, based on the user's overall surfing activity, would be shown on the user's home page, and revenues would be split between Claria and the Web site.
According to comScore MediaMetrix, an Internet statistics firm, 26 million people, or 23 percent of Yahoo's visitors in April, used its customized page service, known as My Yahoo. The service's users spent more than twice as much time at the portal as the average Yahoo visitor does, and viewed more than twice as many pages. Put another way, comScore said, My Yahoo users account for 23 percent of all Yahoo visitors, but they represent 49 percent of total time spent and 51 percent of pages viewed. Yahoo would not disclose how much advertising revenue My Yahoo brings in.
Claria said "tens of millions" of Internet users allow it to track their Web surfing - or, at least, the surfing of whoever uses their computer. The privacy policy for Claria's advertising products promises that it will never associate a user's name with surfing activity, and because the company only tracks the clicks on a computer, it cannot necessarily know who is visiting different sites from one hour to the next.
Claria's users agree to the tracking in exchange for free software that helps them fill out forms automatically or gives weather information, among other things. Assuming Claria attracts publishers willing to offer its PersonalWeb service, the incentive for users will merely be a more customized Web experience.
The same goes for Google's home page service. But some privacy advocates say they believe that as Google entices users to agree to surveillance of their online activities, it must do more to prove it deserves their trust. Ari Schwartz, a policy analyst at the Center for Democracy and Technology, a research firm, said it gives Google a pretty good picture of what people are doing online.
Mr. Schwartz said that the company had been "above the board" when disclosing privacy issues raised by some of its products. Ms. Mayer of Google pointed out that when the company released its desktop search product last year, it asked administrators of computers with multiple users - like those in cybercafes - not to download it lest they inadvertently gather their users' surfing activity. But, Mr. Schwartz added: "They need to do a better job at educating people about how this could impact their privacy."
News Source
http://www.nytimes.com
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