Google Alerts Now Available in RSS
Google recently announced the support for RSS in Google Alerts. Previously only available as an email notification, this significantly increases the worth of Google Alerts for me.
I have email alerts setup for some searches (like my name) but there are many more searches I can think of that I wouldn’t want an email alert for. A daily RSS summary would be all that I’d want because of the frequency of the searches.
With RSS results now available, I think a lot more people will be using Google Alerts and the people that are using it will be searching much more.
Does Google care about user privacy, or just public image?
In this post on Mashable, Stan Schroeder questions Google’s motives in their jab to Microsoft about privacy. In the official Google Weblog entry, Google states “Google became the first leading search engine to announce a policy to anonymize our search server logs in the interests of privacy.”
Google has already been anonymizing their logs after 18 months, so this is more of a change than anything new. They’re simply reducing that time to 9 months.
This is a good thing, as it reduces the amount of time that the government or some organization with a court order can obtain access to your search history or website activity on any of Google’s properties. Don’t think it can happen to you? Just take a look at what happened in the recent Viacom case, where Google was ordered to hand over user data, and Viacom demanded that data include the users’ IP addresses, which could be used to identify them.
Viacom caved to the pressure, however, and users’ IP addresses were not given up (this time). But the threat is real, and it’s only a matter of time before a judge in a lawsuit or a government agency forces a company to give up their logs. The fact that Google will only have 9 months of logs on file is definitely a positive, since the average court can often take that long to make it to trial.
So does Google care about user privacy, or just public image? Google’s mantra is “do no evil” and so as a serious Google user I hope they are sincere. Still, as they continue to grow to monolithic proportions, I’m skeptical at how long before they turn to the dark side.
Google Ad Planner Launched
Google recently launched Google Ad Planner, a media planning tool designed to help advertising agency media buyers choose and manage their media buys. According to Google, with Ad Planner you can:
- Define audiences by demographics and interests.
- Search for websites relevant to your audience.
- Access aggregated statistics on the number of unique visitors, page views, and other data for millions of websites from over 40 countries.
- Create lists of websites where you’d like to advertise and store them in a media plan.
- Generate aggregated website statistics for your media plan.
Google Ad Planner helps you identify websites to advertise on by searching popular websites by demographics and interests. Once you have selected various websites to advertise with, you can create a media plan and/or export the data.
Google Insights for Search Shows Trends Over Time
Google just released Insights for Search, a new service that lets you enter one or more keywords and compare their popularity and use over time. Search results include geographical information, related news articles, related searches and rising searches.
The service bears a strong resemblance to Google Trends, with some added features such as the ability to distinguish from similar phrases that mean different things, and added a heatmap showing where concentrations of searches came from.
Google CEO Eric Schmidt Turns Back on iPhone
Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt, a member of Apple’s Board of Directors, recently said that he
. . . now recuses himself from mobile-phone discussions at Apple board meetings.
Sure, with Google’s new mobile operating system Android, he does have a little conflict of interest. My question: If there is enough conflict of interest there to excuse yourself from a board meeting, should you be on the board at all?