Secret Agent Search Engine

In an article that appeared in The Guardian a week ago, Andrew Brown reveals the vast tracts of information that search engine Google maintains on its users. The major case study in the article is the story of a Portuguese soccer fan from Florida whose wife has left him, and is told through chronological search words, starting with “marriage counseling” and “spying on the wife,” and ending with “motorcycle insurance” and “video surveillance.”

Google gathers this information by identifying each computer with a cookie, assigning a number to the user, and storing all search records. This kind of Big Brother monitoring, although seemingly anonymous*, is kind of scary. And I wonder what kind of records Google has on me, with the random search words I type in to solve crossword puzzles.

This type of invisible monitoring makes me think of the Sitemeter webcounter I have linked to this blog. If you go to the very bottom of the page, you’ll see a little square icon in rainbow colours. Clicking on this will take you to the Sitemeter website which keeps information on who goes to this website. If you click on By Details (under Recent Visitors) it will give you a whole whack of information about who is checking the blog, complete with where in the world they are, what type of computer they are using, and, if they found it through a search engine, what search words they used to get to the blog.

My number of hits increased after an entry entitled “Naturally Nude Naturists” was posted because (as I discovered with the use of Sitemeter) people were coming to my blog after searching the words “nude” and “naturist.” I also see hits increase when I send out e-mails with links to a specific post (like Guess the Sport) and I can tell if people have entered my blog from one of these e-mails. Given that almost every detail except someone’s name is provided, I sometimes like to guess who each user is, based on computer type, time of hit, and entry method.

My data analysis is rudimentary compared to that of Google. And my motives are for passing interest, whereas Google uses its information to inform advertising (I’ve always wondered how Hotmail knows to put Lavalife ads in the bar to the right of my inbox), which seems innocent enough when compared to lawsuit that saw Google fight to keep its collected information out of the hands of the US government.

And do you remember the ruckus caused when China tried to censor its citizens’ use of the internet earlier this year? Brown notes that “the real power for a totalitarian government is no longer just censorship. It is to allow its citizens to search for anything they want – and then remember it.”

Who would have thought that such a clear picture of someone’s life could be constructed based on words you type into your search engine’s window – the spurned Portuguese soccer fan certainly didn’t.

Careful what you search for.


* Brown’s article mentions the case of a Midwestern church lady whose penchant for Christian quilted wall hangings caused her to be exposed for using search words for vibrators and frigidity because her interests were so specific (the wall hangings, not the vibrators).