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Google Wants to Organize Users’ Daily Lives

By: Jed Nottingham

Posted: 05/25/2007

SANTA MONICA, Calif. - Google’s ambition to maximize the personal information it holds on users is so great that the search engine envisions a day when it can tell people what jobs to take and how they can spend their days off.

Eric Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, said gathering more personal data was a key way for Google to expand, and the company believes it is a logical extension of its stated mission to organize the world’s information.

"We are very early in the total information we have within Google," Schmidt said. "The algorithms will get better and we will get better at personalization. The goal is to enable Google users to be able to ask the questions such as, ‘What shall I do tomorrow?’ and ‘What job shall I take?’"

The race to accumulate the most comprehensive database of individual information has become the new battleground for search engines, as it will allow the industry to offer more personalized advertisements. This is the ultimate goal for the search industry, since such advertising would command higher rates.

Schmidt told journalists in London, "We cannot even answer the most basic questions because we don’t know enough about you. That is the most important aspect of Google’s expansion."

He said Google’s newly relaunched iGoogle service, which allows users to personalize their own Google search page and publish their own content, would be a key feature.

Another service, Google personalized search, which launched two years ago, allows users to give Google permission to store their Web-surfing history, what they have searched and clicked on, and use this to create more personalized search results for them. Another service under development is Google Recommendations — wherein the search suggests products and services the user may like, based on the user’s already established preferences. Google does not sell advertising against these services yet but could in time use them to display more targeted ads to people.

Yahoo! this year unveiled new search technology this year that monitors what Internet users do on its portal and uses that information to build a profile of their interests. The profiles then are used to display ads to the people most likely to be interested in them. The technology will be incorporated into Yahoo’s advertising revamped advertising system dubbed Project Panama.

Autonomy, a U.K.-based search company, also is developing technology for "transaction hijacking, which monitors when Internet surfers are about to make a purchase online — and can suggest cheaper alternatives. Although such monitoring could raise privacy issues, Google stresses that the iGoogle and personalization services are optional.

The Information Commissioner’s Office in the U.K. said it was not concerned about the personalization developments.

Earlier this year, however, Google bowed to concerns from privacy activists in the U.S. and Europe by agreeing to limit the amount of time it keeps information about the Internet searches made by its users to two years.

Google also faced concerns that its proposed $3.1billion acquisition of DoubleClick will lead to an erosion of online privacy.

Fears have been stoked by the potential for Google to build up a detailed picture of someone’s behavior by combining its records of Web searches with the information from DoubleClick’s "cookies," the software it places on users’ machines to track which sites they visit.

Schmidt said the company was working on technology to reduce concerns.