Why Google want to know about you?
Alright, today I come up
with another cool thing to discuss; this is a bit serious one and also this is
a question which you must definitely worry about.
Have you ever wondered
what sort of things Google knows about you? I guess most of your answers will
be “NO”. It is maybe because you are not aware about such a thing, or
that doesn't make any sense with you. Anyway, if you have really
worried about this, and still you couldn't find an answer, here is
the place. I will tell you what Google knows about you :) and still, if you
never thought about that, here is a good opportunity. Get to know what Google
knows about you. It will be useful.
Tip: Google is a company which engages in providing online services. Hence if you have ever used Google to search something, you will eventually become a customer of them. They treat you like a customer. Every company would want to know something more about their customers. Similarly, there is no exception with Google. They also need to know about their customers.
There are many things to discuss, when it comes to Google’s user tracking attempts and how they do it. Those are really cool stuff; so I will talk about them in coming posts in details.
Why Google need to know
about you?
As we discussed in our
previous topic, the main stream of income for Google is through advertisements.
By knowing about you, Google can decide which type of advertisements should be
visible to you. So Google can bring you the ads which are relevant to your
interesting areas. In the meantime, for the advertisers, Google is showing ads
only for people who are interested in the advertiser’s product or the service.
Hence there is a high possibility of converting the visitor into a customer
(for the advertiser).
How Google get to know
about you?
Google has several ways
to track a visitor. And they keep finding new methods to track the users very
accurately. The simplest method used by Google is storing a Cookie in your
computer.
A Cookie is a very small data file which can be stored in your computer by a website. This file can contain data about your last visit to a website, your usernames, email ids etc.
What Google do is they
store a cookie in your computer which will be there for 180 days, so that
Google can identify you every time you visit Google’s website. Then they store
everything you search in a database. We will talk what they do with these data,
in the latter part of this post.
Even though this seems
like a good trick, it is not always accurate. Suppose a computer which is used
by several people. Then Google will have the search queries of many people. But
what they need to know is about each and every one. Not about all the people at
once.
So what they did next is
they introduced a new feature to search the web using Google, while the guests
are logged into their Gmail accounts. This method obviously helped Google to
track users in a unique way. Because every time you leave a public computer,
you will always sign out of your Google account. So Google knows that every
query after the logout is done by another user. If nobody is logged in, Google
will use the Cookie method to track the computer.
Now let’s come back to
the topic again.
What Google do with
those stored data / queries?
They analyze every
search query performed by each user and generate a simple idea about you. This
helps them to differentiate you from others and also to decide which category
of advertisements matches best to you.
For example: if you are
a web developer or a web designer, you might be searching Google about day to
day errors you get, or you may be searching about website layout ideas or about
tutorials on Php, html, javascript and so on.
Since google have all
these queries, when they analyze you, they will understand that you are a
person who is interested in Web Development, designing, web hosting etc. So
they will show you ads relevant to that subject. Say if you were searching for
a php script, and you see an advertisement saying “Get free php scripts!!”
Won’t you click on it? Yes you will.
This is the idea behind
these tracings. Actually Google does not want to collect your personal
information. They only attempt to get an idea about you so that they can help
you find what you want.
Google use these tracked
information about you in each and every product of Google. Even in the Google
search results, they filter results according to your preferences. Yes, they
know what you like and what you dislike. They know in which links you are
clicking and not.
This is known as Google
personalized results. We will discuss more about this in coming posts.
Now my question to
you…..Have you ever experienced the effect of Google’s personalized results?
Share your experience with others.
Categories
:
Tech
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