Would You Share Your Search History?
Would you want your search history shared with your friends? If a report from the Google Operating System is correct then Google thinks you do. According to the report, Google has created a Facebook App that lets you search Google from within Facebook, logs your search history, and shares it with friends via your mini-feed.
So far, however, I have not been able to get to Google's Facebook application, which has been plagued by errors all week. This has led some to wonder whether this is even an official Google application.
"I seriously doubt that this application even exists," wrote Rodney Rumford on Face Reviews on Tuesday. Rumford went on to list a litany of reasons why he thinks the application is a fake or from a third-party -- some rather convincing. According to Ionut Alex Chitu of Google Operating System, the app was made by Mark Lucovsky from Google (though I imagine even Google employees can't just use Google's name on official-sounding applications without permission).
Real or mockup? Image from Google Operating System.
Regardless of whether the app is real, fake, third-party or built by Google, it begs the question: Is it even a good idea? Does anyone really want the things they search for attached to their name and broadcast to their friends? We often share intimate details of our lives with search engines (such as searching for information on medical ailments). These are often things we want to keep private. How many people out there would actually want to share their searches with their social network?
I personally would never opt to share my search history with anyone. I make hundreds of searches per day, many for work, and many for personal reasons, but none that I think the world has any reason to know about (also, given the number of searches most people make every day, watching the searches of my friends would quickly get boring/annoying and overwhelm the useful information about my friends' activities). What do you think? Would you share your searches? Leave a comment below.
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>> Would you share your searches?
Most certainly not. Not deliberately anyway.
I logged into Fcebook last night and saw a popular post in my Seattle, WA network... it was from a teen girl who'd lost her phone and needed numbers from everyone she calls... and 192 of her friends posted their phone numbers. Publicly. In a group that over 70,000 people belong to. So, while I wouldn't share my search history a lot of other people obviously don't have a highly developed sense of privacy... :)
Yes!
I want my grandma to be able to see what kind of porn I'm looking at. Better yet, I want it to come up when I'm at work! It would be really cool if it would just look through all my gmail contacts and automatically email everyone whenever I search for something.
While we're at it, why not just send every ounce of personal data to all of my friends automatically? It would save me the time of having to keep up with everybody... and has the added benefit of my employer thinking I don't know what I'm doing when I search for help on a topic I work with.
Bring it on!
Information is the most wanted commodity. Google will soon own that commodity and become one of the most powerful companies in the world.
V
I think google has tapped into a market that is already sharing more personal information on the internet than before, so adding your search history is no more worse than having your name tagged in dubious photo's for your employer to see.
The use of this search history has benefits in that users would be able to share relevant information and content discovery across a broad spectrum of users - who typically would never have done the search - so in one way i think this is a good idea - other may think different...
If it automatically sent out all my search queries - that would be lunacy. I would never agree to that.
I think that this article is incorrect though. While I have no basis for believing this, other than logic, I think a mistake was made in your description of the functionality of the tool.
My guess is that you can search, and then choose to share your results. Meaning, you share if you like a particular result and want to share it. Not, every search and/or every result is shared. If you look at the screenshot it sure looks like this (note the "share this" buttons on each result)
If every search and every result were shared, it would overwhelm the mini-feeds and everyone would cancel the app immediately.
On the other hand, it makes sense to be able to share a specific search result from right within Facebook.
I could be wrong. People do stupid stuff every day. But I think it is much more likely that this is a useful app and functions in the way I just described.
Now I will go try and add it to see if I am right. =^)
Tim McCormack
iRent2u.com - the Online Rental Marketplace
I don't think that a lot of people would share their search history, nor do I think that this google app is useful.
What Jimmy said, hilarious.
Though I'm facing hard time trying to believe that the app was really released by Google, I'd hate to see my search history being shared with others even if the application is an official Google release.
Something tells me that Google won't take such an stupid step because it'll be against their Search History privacy policy.
Very silly idea. What reason could anyone possible have for wanting to implement such an invasive app?! Its basic premise is closer that of viruses or spyware than any kind useful tool that someone would install of their own free will.
Facebook won't load the page it's on anyway, so I'm guessing it's been taken down...