This post is about Google's latest move to force personalization on everyone. Please first read their original announcement.

Back? Let's roll.

Google's goal has always been to give you exactly the information we want to give you right when you want it. With the growth of the Internet and all the new information coming online every day, this might sound hard but we rock.

We're constantly trying to improve the quality of your search results. One of the ways we're tackling this is by personalizing your search experience. After all, we are the ones that know what you're really looking for.

We have two main ways of personalizing your Google experience. First, you can customize products and services like the Google Personalized Homepage. Personalizing your homepage gives you the at-a-glance information that you care about right at your fingertips, just the way you want it. This is not new, really, and there are many others that do it better.

Second, we offer automatic spyware (till 2038, no less!) through things like personalized search and recommendations. Our goal with these types of technologies is to make your Google search experience better based on what we know about your preferences, without you knowing about it.

Today, we're taking another step toward making personalization more available to you by combining these two into a single signed-in experience. Actually, it's not just these two that got combined. If you are signed into any other service, like GMail, you'll still be signed into your Google Account of course, and so now, when you're signed in, you'll have access to a personalized Google—one that combines personalized search results and a personalized homepage and everything else.

Keep in mind that personalization is subtle—at first you may not notice any difference. But over time, as the search engine learns your preferences, you'll see our quarterly results triple, and hopefully even quadruple. We can't wait!

By the way, you've always known this was coming. You see, if you actually read our original paper describing Google, you would have found these two gems buried near the end:

• And, the d damping factor is the probability at each page the "random surfer" will get bored and request another random page. One important variation is to only add the damping factor d to a single page, or a group of pages. This allows for personalization and can make it nearly impossible to deliberately mislead the system in order to get a higher ranking.
• We are also working to extend the use of link structure and link text. Simple experiments indicate PageRank can be personalized by increasing the weight of a user's home page or bookmarks.

If you don't want to see personalized results, just sign out of your Google Account; yes that includes GMail because we don't think anyone stays logged in anyway. After all, the goal is to give you what you want all the time. So give it a whirl and let us know what you think.

Labels: spyware, annoying, stupid, decision

Think that's funny? It's not. Here is why:

• I search because I'm looking for new things; personalization goes against this basic premise. Thus on an abstract level, personalization is a bad idea.
• It's really just spyware. Love it or hate it, Google is now explicitely tracking you, what you like, and what you don't like. Somewhere in the many datacenters Google owns, your life is being stored without any means to access it, edit it, or better yet delete it. OK, you can close your Google account and delete everything with it, but is that really a solution?
• It's annoying. I stayed logged into my GMail account and surf around. Once in a while, I check in to see if a new mail has arrived. It's like having auto mail checks by keeping Outlook, Thunderbird or whatever open all the time. Now Google is forcing me to sign out just so that I don't get tracked by them, therefore adding another step (signing in) when I want to check my GMail. First class annoyance.
• It's tempting to speculate what this means for the ads that will be displayed to you on the SERPs and through AdSense. Suppose you search for something with good CPC earnings, say [adult toys] and several variations of that. When you did that search, you didn't click any adverts, and Google gets upset. Now suppose you later search for [toys] for your children... what adverts will be shown then? This is why I commented about quarterly results above.

And that's it in a nutshell. It's a really bad idea and might be the thing that will bring Google down. People hate being spied on and if enough mainstream media pick this angle, it'll be all over for the big G.