WebProNews

Tag: Search History

  • $5.5 Million — That’s the Price Americans Want for Their Search History

    $5.5 Million — That’s the Price Americans Want for Their Search History

    A new report demonstrates Americans may value their search history a little more than some companies may have expected, putting a $5.5 million price tag on it.

    Google and Facebook have led to a massive erosion of privacy, as users have been willing to trade away their personal information for the free services the companies, and many others, provided. In recent years, however, users have begun pushing back, valuing their privacy more and more. According to a survey by SimpleTexting, Americans are finally valuing their search, putting a price tag of $5.5 million on it.

    SimpleTexting surveyed 3,000 US participants to see just how much they valued their search results and what they would give up in exchange for making it public. The results were surprising.

    • Users would require $5.5 million in exchange for making their search history public.
    • 1 in 4 users would give up their car for a year instead of making their search public.
    • Nearly 3 in 10 would rather give up their smartphone for a year.
    • Nearly 7 in 10 would rather give up alcohol for a year.
    • 2 in 5 would rather give all streaming services for a year.
    • More than 1 in 3 would give up rather give up sex for a year.

    The survey is good news for privacy advocates and hopefully indicates increased awareness of the importance of privacy.

  • Yandex Tweaks Algorithm To Include Search Session History

    Russian search engine Yandex announced a new change to its algorithm that looks at a person’s search history from within a particular search session to deliver results and suggestions based on what it says is the “full picture” of the user’s search behavior.

    “We all know what it takes to understand another person,” the company says. “It’s a lot. Even if all you need to understand is what a person is looking for online. We have been trying to do this for years. A person’s interests and preferences give a good clue as to what they want to find. We used to look into a user’s search history as far as a few months back to choose for them the search results that would be most relevant to their scope of interests.”

    Yandex. Pesonalised Search Results from Yandex on Vimeo.

    “Updating our knowledge of users’ interests once a day allows us to understand their more-or-less stable interests, such as a love of books or football, or that they speak Russian and live in Saint Petersburg,” says Yandex. “More than half of all searches on Yandex, however, are about something that interests the searcher at the very moment of searching and stops interest them the moment after. To be able to cater to such momentary searches, we now analyse search sessions in real time.”

    The company notes that the change helps it deliver more relevant results to users who don’t actually have another search history on the search engine.

    Yandex’s real-time processing system processes over 10 terabytes of data per day.

    More on the changes here.

  • Google Adds History Link to Mobile Home Page

    Google has added a new "history" link on its mobile home page. This lets you easily get to sites you’ve been to and items you’ve starred from Android, iPhone, or desktop searches.

    "If you’ve enabled search history in your account (tap ‘Settings’ and select ‘Save Searches’ under ‘Search History’, then tap ‘Save’), the history that you see is a combination of all your searches done while you are signed-in, whether you are searching from a laptop at home, your desktop computer at work, or your phone while on-the-go," Google’s Mobile Team explains. "Your mobile searches are marked with a little phone icon so you can tell them apart. For websites you’ve visited while searching on a desktop or laptop, you’ll see screenshot thumbnails that can help you recognize and return to the right sites quickly."

    "If you want to remove any history items, you can tap the ‘Edit’ button at the top of the page and delete individual search queries," the team adds. "If you prefer to stop recording search history all together, choose the ‘Do not save searches’ option under "Settings" on the home screen and tap ‘Save.’"

    You will be presented with tabs for "history" and "starred", so you can easily access either one. There is more info about the feature available here.

  • Bing Suggests Queries Based on Search History

    Microsoft announced today that Bing is just now supporting query history in its Autosuggest feature. In other words, if you have your search history enabled, Bing will incorporate past queries you’ve made into the suggestions.

    "You are in full control of your query history," the Bing Team stresses.  "We know your privacy is very important to you.  You can turn History on or off at any time or selectively remove any portion of your search history using the Manage History option.  You will see both of these choices every time you use Autosuggest."

    Bing suggests queries based on history

    "Many search tasks span multiple search sessions even days or weeks," Bing says. "In fact, 44% of non-navigational search sessions last longer than 1 week!  Perhaps you need to research the purchase of a new automobile.  You might use Bing to find a retail location and to further research online – over many days – to make the best decisions on your big ticket purchase.  With history support in Autosuggest, you can restart a previous search session by typing a few characters to see your previous queries and start researching right where you left off.  We know from our testing that this makes you more effective at your longer search tasks."

    The suggestions that are based on your search history are listed in purple, to stand out from the other blue suggestions.

  • Google Uses Hours of Search History to Serve Ads

    Google has made some adjustments to how it uses referral URLs for contextual matching of AdSense ads. Google has started expanding the use of query words in referral URLs to a few hours.

    Basically what this means is that Google is using user’s search history to determine what ads to show on sites using AdSense. If a user arrives at one AdSense site via a search results page, and then goes to another AdSense site within a few hours, they might see ads based on the referral data from the first one.

    Ads By Google "The technical way that we’re doing this is by associating the relevant query words in the referral URL with the existing advertising cookie on the user’s browser," says AdSense Associate Product Manager Rebecca Illowsky. "After a short period of time (a few hours) the query words are no longer used for the purposes of matching ads. Of course, users can continue to opt out of our advertising cookie at any time here."

    "This allows us to deliver more relevant ads on a wider range of AdSense partner sites that a user may browse over the course of a few hours," she adds. "Using signals from the referral URL is just one part of our teams’ continuing efforts to deliver even better contextually matched ads on your website."

    Some people claim to have already seen a rise in clickthrough rate since Google made these changes. Commenting on Google’s explanation, one reader says, "I saw a rise in CTR and was wondering [if] something was cooking so I guess this was it."

    Have you seen a rise in AdSense CTR recently? Let us know.