Google’s Autocomplete Suggestions and the Issue of Privacy
One of the most well known and widely used features produced by Google is their Instant Search, which automatically loads results in real time while someone is typing into the search bar. Google suggests results using many different methods, including geography of the searcher, query volume of unique verifiable users, as well as keyword and phrase mentions, just to name a few. And although it is a factor, rankings of these suggestions are not determined by just how popular a search is. According to Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land, “some less popular searches might be shown above more popular ones, if Google deems them more relevant,” but what allows these searches to reach the top of the suggestions? The quick answer: freshness. Instant Search also uses what Google calls a “freshness layer,” meaning that if a term suddenly spikes in popularity acutely, it’ll trump the other results until its popularity decreases. In addition, some queries are removed if they are deemed inappropriate by Google’s standards. In relation to Instant Search, Google introduced an intelligent personal assistant called Google Now, which takes their search feature to a whole new level. Essentially, Google Now goes through emails, calendar appointments, search history, and even phone calls in order to provide you with the most current and relevant information instantly. While this may sound as a huge leap into the future, “technology that does more than crunch numbers, but actually monitors our habits can easily slide over from useful to unsettling.” As Gavriel Brown from the Commentator states, using Google Now, and even Google, is a tradeoff. Increasingly, it seems that the ability to use these company’s products to their fullest potential mandates more and more surrender of our privacy while refusing to do so results in the opposite. And while Google assures us that all the information it has stored on its millions of users is safe, who’s to say another situation like HeartBleed won’t happen again? Regardless, one thing remains the same: privacy is beginning to become a thing of the past.
Sullivan’s discussion on how Google’s Instant Search engine works relates primarily to the material of chapter 14 and the class’s discussion on search using web structures. A number of things go into ranking pages for a search query such as links, text, click throughs, geography and time, and personalization. As described above, Google uses all these factors and more in order to display the most relevant searches to its users. Other search engines like Bing and Yahoo use similar methods to rank queries as well. However, as Brown pointed out in her article, when does this convenience cross the line from helpful to creepy? With Google Now it seems as though we may be reaching that point. It even seems like privacy has an inverse relationship to technological improvement because as technology becomes more sophisticated and intelligent, a little bit of our privacy is lost at its expense. Whether Google decides to continue to explore new ways to access its database completely depends on how carefully they deliver data while retaining some form of privacy.
News Articles:
Gavriel Brown: http://www.yucommentator.org/2013/10/creepy-or-helpful-google-now-and-the-future-of-the-predictive-search/
Danny Sullivan: http://searchengineland.com/how-google-instant-autocomplete-suggestions-work-62592