The Alchemy of Search

Imagine for a moment that we live in the hypothetical world where the search engines allow you to control your own privacy. Imagine we live in a world you are allowed to access search engines using SSL. A world where the search engines allowed you to prevent third party intermediaries from intercepting the content of our thoughts with the same minimum diligence used to protect our credit card numbers during an online transaction.

In such a Utopian society, search engines would go the next step and not log your search request if you accessed through their sites through that secure connection (unless they were already subject to a government SEARCH WARRANT to spy on you). Of course, to protect themselves and their advertisers against click fraud and address other legitimate concerns, the engines could still associate data for paid links that you clicked, for example, without saving the actual query or the organic clicks.

These steps are not the complete solution, but they are a small start to swinging the pendulum in the other direction.

Privacy International issued a “study” over the weekend which analyzed the privacy risks, policies and culture of leading websites and singled out Google as the worst offender. Many people have already weighed in on this issue, notably Danny Sulivan with Maybe It’s Privacy International’s Report That Sucks and Matt Cutts with Privacy International Loses All Credibility. Today, Google responded to the EU working group on privacy. These posts generated hundreds of comments, including a couple by yours truly.

The issues surrounding privacy are both emotional and complicated. It is hard to imagine any scenario in the digital age that will put the genie back in the bottle Every purchase you make on a credit card is reported, recorded, parsed and resold by companies like http://www.acxiom.com/ as consumer profiles. Every opinion you ever post on a forum, blog or MySpace page is permanently cached somewhere. Every search, email, text message and IM has been entered in your permanent record.

Despite these facts, search is more personal and intimate than a purchase or a rant on a blog. Search reflects our innermost thoughts, dreams and fears and contains content as well as context. Search contains thoughts we would never put in an email or send in a message to our closest friends. While it is easy to associate our concerns about search privacy with the search engines and thus launch a highly public tirade at Google (or Yahoo, MSN and Ask), the problem of privacy and search goes well beyond the engines. As Matt Cutts and others have pointed out, the greatest threat to an individual’s privacy may be their ISP.

So, here is our modest proposal for the first step to the privacy issue:
We call upon all of the search engines to default to (or at least ALLOW) encryption for searchers via SSL to prevent third parties from intercepting our searches. A quick check showed that none of the major engines allow users to access their pages via https: Ask and MSN return a 404 and Google and Yahoo redirect to http.

Default to search in the secure mode (https) so at least the content of our query is protected from all of the intermediate players and the full responsibility for protecting them is on the engines. It isn’t a solution, but it is a good first step!

The recent New York Times article about Google search contained a note that Google is always on the lookout for bad search results. They acknowledged that constant minor tweaks occasionally produce results that are low quality.

We are all aware of the occasional site that ranks and appears to defy logic, but I am curious about queries where a majority of the results, or at least the top few, are particularly irrelevant. What “normal” queries do you run that gives really bad results?