Web search engines
[1] such as Google are now used by everyone on the internet, but some people (me)
think that they collect too much information about us. Web search engines
simply work by storing information about
many web pages, which they retrieve from the HTML itself. [2] The most
popular current search engines in the United States are Google, Bing, and
Yahoo. Google currently has about 84% [3]
of the current web search engine market share. Basically companies like Google
use computer software called spiders [1]
to follow every link on every website and then store each webpage’s HTML in
their database. I will be talking only about Google’s web search engine since it
is by far the most popular search engine right now.
With more than 4
billion indexed web pages stored on over 500,000 computers [1], it is
amazing that Google can instantly display search results. Not only does Google
display website results for keywords that you search for, they also display
images, products, local businesses on a map, and more. Also, Google owns
Youtube, and Youtube is its own search engine just for videos. Amazingly, 20% of Google search queries are ones we
haven't seen in the past 90 days. [4] How Google determines what results
show up for a search is a secret and complex. They are always tweaking their
algorithms to display better results. Google recently announced that they make about 500 changes to their algorithm
annually. [5] Matt Cutts, the spokesman for Google’s webspam team, admitted
that Google uses over 200 signals to
determine search rankings such as
the speed in which a webpage loads. [6]
Google logs all the searches we make. They probably store
them for forever. This is a huge privacy concern for some people, especially
since a lot of people use their Gmail. They know too much about us. However, Google
claims they anonymize the IP addresses
in their search logs after 9 months and anonymize their stored cookies after 18
months. [7]
Facebook has a built in search engine, too. The owner of
Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, has said that privacy is dead. It appears that
Facebook is tracking every single thing you do on their website for forever
including your last known physical
location, with latitude, longitude, time/date, altitude, and more. [8]
In conclusion, Google is the best example of a useful web
search engine, but they are looking more and more like Big Brother [9] every year with all the information they are
collecting about us.
Sources:
1.
page 189 of the book (ISBN 1-111-53165-X)
3.
http://www.karmasnack.com/about/search-engine-market-share/
5.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303505504577406751747002494.html
7.
http://www.google.com/policies/privacy/faq/
9.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Brother_(Nineteen_Eighty-Four)
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