Wednesday, October 15, 2008

Summary for October 15, 2008

For today, I read an article by Michael Zimmer called “The Externalities of Search 2.0: The Emerging Privacy Threats When the Drive for the Perfect Search Engine Meets Web 2.0”. The article discusses Web 2.0 and the quest to find the perfect search engine, meaning a search engine that can return results based on what that particular user wants in a fast and efficient manner.

The author discusses two things that a search engine would need to have. Those things are "perfect reach" and "perfect recall". Perfect reach is basically explaining how the Internet is much more desirable to the user when everything is findable through a search engine. The ability to go to one website and have thousands of results (articles, pictures, music) come up makes the Internet a lot easier to navigate through. Perfect recall has to do with personalization for each individual user. In order for this to work, though, issues of privacy come into play. "The primary means for search engines to obtain perfect recall is to monitor and track user's search habits and history" (Zimmer, 3). Zimmer explains how in order for perfect recall to work, websites such as Yahoo! or Google must track IP addresses, use cookies, etc.- all things that question a person's right to privacy.

This was an interesting article because it was one that I can relate my own life to. I have been starting to notice that websites sometimes feature ads that might pertain to me more than others, and I was always wondering how that was done. While it is cool to have the only ads to appear as ones that offer products that are desirable to me, at the same time, it's a little creepy to know that someone out there is tracking my every move on the Internet. The Internet is no longer a place where you can put private information up without it being seen and examined by others. That is especially true with social websites such as Facebook and Myspace, in which people post numerous private photos, blogs, comments, etc., that they (and myself included) do not want others to look at, however, as stated in this article, there is a good chance someone out there has seen it or might come across it in the near future.

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