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May 16, 2006

Google Notebook = One More User Action Tracking Device

Google Notebook is live, and Graywolf has a good review.

Richard Zwicky proposes it might be a new way to spam Google. Most likely, similar to spamming Yahoo Answers, that'll probably be way more trouble than it's worth, but it might be one more way for search engines to track user actions and determine how popular and useful a site really is, as opposed to depending on link popularity to assign rankings.

Some other ways search engines could be tracking user actions:

  • Tagging in Yahoo MyWeb
  • Tagging in del.icio.us
  • Google Personalized Search, Search History, and the Bookmark contained therein
  • Toolbars (duh)
  • Possibly scraping community-edited sites like Digg to see what's popular (or just arranging a direct feed with the owners of said site)
  • Feed readers in MyYahoo and the Google Homepage
  • Alexa rankings (pretty weak, but seems to be more accurate once you get below 20,000 or so)

Oddly, most of the functionality of Google Notebook seems to depend on downloading their browser plugin. While it's readily apparent when you sign up with Firefox, when I signed up with IE it was nowhere to be found. Perhaps I'm a moron (possible) or maybe they just haven't added it yet, but I scoured that site in IE and there was nary a plugin download link in site.

Google has more on their blog.

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