62% Don’t Trust Search Engines
Friday, July 20th, 2007;
-- Jordan McCollum |
Hakia.com has sponsored the Search for Better Search website, which so far looks rather thin, though it does have some interested poll responses. Among them: 62% don’t trust search engines with their private information.
That should probably read something more like “I don’t want search engines to have my private information, but really, Google could steal my identity at any moment because I’ve already surrendered all my private information to AdSense.” Unfortunately, the poll’s sample size is rather small (298 respondents so far).
Hakia’s influence on the page seems to show through, as well. An older poll, with almost 700 respondents, asks, “What do you think a search engine should do?” The top two answers by quite a margin are “Understand my question the way a human does 38% (262 votes)” and “Bring highly relevant results with semantic precision 26% (179 votes).”
Hm… Hakia, a natural language search engine sponsors a survey that finds that more than a third of users want search engines to understand like a human?
Another poll on the page, with 245 respondents thus far, asks “What is the single most important issue search engines can address to win users’ trust?” Only the top two responses: “Give users access to and editing permission over the data they keep. 19% (47 votes)” (hurray for AskEraser!) and “Don’t ever store user information. 29% (72 votes).”
There’s one really, really, really simple way to make sure search engines don’t ever store your information. Stop using them. Now. Completely.
Do search engines have their users over a barrel? Perhaps. Search engines have become the default way to navigate the Internet. But, as I’ve said before, “I think it’s unreasonable to expect any interactive software company not to collect information about its users in an effort to improve the end user experience.”
Perhaps that old economics saying should be changed to “There’s no such thing as a free search.”
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July 20th, 2007 at 9:01 pm
298, wow what a sample!
July 21st, 2007 at 6:49 am
With search I think much of the problem is how people do the searching. SE’s seem to perform poorly with very niche results, in my opinion.
July 21st, 2007 at 6:41 pm
[...] In the search front, Ask.com is leading the way on search privacy by announcing AskEraser, a feature that allows complete privacy searching. Google earlier announced it’s shortening cookie privacy expiration to just 18 months, far shorter than their previous year 2038 (yes, 2038! that far in the future) settings. Interestingly, a recent survey sponsored by Hakia.com reveals that 62% don’t trust search engines with their private information. Ask.com is going in the right direction. MSN Live is said to be gaining market share, up to 13.2% from last year’s 10.1%. Google maintains its lead at 62.7%, while Yahoo is down to 19.6% and Ask at 3.3%. [...]
July 23rd, 2007 at 6:04 am
Hmm .. I would take those results with a pinch of salt. Not only is the sample size not statistically significant, but the audience is bound to have a skewed perception of the search engine market (as Jordan rightly points out)
I wonder how many people on the street actually know what “semantic precision” actually means
July 23rd, 2007 at 6:53 am
There. Just contributed with your polls. Good luck!
July 23rd, 2007 at 10:11 am
What is it that people are so afraid of showing to the world, I mean seriously? Albeit, I do not trust SE, they obviously have their commercial inclinations and that interest might be sufficient to ruin other people lives…
July 25th, 2007 at 8:44 am
I see that you are interested in online search. You should take a look at http://www.linguisticagents.com. It’s a start-up company that has developed a natural language understanding technology that will be used in many applications in addition to search.
August 1st, 2007 at 5:04 am
Don’t ever store user information. 29%
This option leads at this time, while it’s impossible to happen in reality
August 9th, 2007 at 3:56 pm
to finding right informataion about wot we search will be very important problem in the future. i already cant find anything on google.
November 18th, 2007 at 6:19 am
i trust only google