Sometimes I feel like a giant lab rat online - in a maze with a bunch of super beings observing my every move and then controlling what I can and cannot do.
No I am not paranoid – “They” are really out to get me. As regular readers know – we have a pretty strong focus on the user experience here at Tnooz.
I have personally worked on the user experience since the earliest days of the web and, indeed, before that in things like Videotext (now that really dates me!).
There are way too many things which say “Beta” on them because too often that’s code for:
“We are putting this product out there and we want you to debug it for us because frankly we are pretty lazy and we got tired of doing it ourselves…”
Nevertheless, one of the things that is a little worrying in the UEX department is the way search results come back differently on computers with the same characteristics and even in the same location.
I either put this down to Google tracking my every move or to the fact they were actually looking at the interaction as a specimen where the web is their personal large petri dish.
I think the web is becoming more like the Googlesphere every day. Well, friends, we are NOT ALONE.
We now have proof, confirmed by Google, confirming they are indeed always experimenting with us.
Messrs Brin, Page and Schmidt (sounds like a 1970s folk band) seem to be running a giant experiment.
Indeed the paranoia seems to be well founded. Not only is Google experimenting with the results but they are actually tracking keystroke activity.
My attention was caught by an article on Infoworld and a follow-up on Tnooz, Google results now updating like a travel metasearch site.
SEO expert Rob Ousbey captured video of a Google experiment that displays search results that change as you type - a process which is just a little disturbing.
And if you think this is just a one off – apparently not.
Google itself gave some insight into this on their blog from Friday, announcing the following:
"Today we’ve launched a change to our ranking algorithm that will make it much easier for users to find a large number of results from a single site.
This is enough to drive anyone to becoming a conspiracy theorist. What worries me more than anything else is that now so much power and infrastructure flows through Google that there is almost no possible way that Google cannot do evil. (Yes, a double negative).
I am not doubting their desire to be good and to “do no evil”, but when they can mess with the results as they are doing on both a minor and a macro scale, I know am being abused.
Couple this with the ability to make money and maximize the results to tweak search to suit Google’s commercial ends and we have an end to net neutrality.
But that’s okay because Google has already decided that it is good for us to dispense with that arcane concept.
So next time you feel that “They Are Watching You”, just remember they are and tracking your every keystroke. You have been warned.