Getting to Know You

Google’s intro­duc­tion of new exten­sions for Fire­fox is all about know­ing more about some users.

This week, Google intro­duced two new Fire­fox exten­sions: Google Safe Brows­ing and Blog­ger Web Com­ments which are pro­vid­ing richer inte­gra­tion with the desk­top and a num­ber of new fea­tures based on your surf­ing patterns.

But the ques­tion, when look­ing at those is why is Google inter­ested in areas that don’t seem that close to search: the truth is that they are closely tied to Google’s busi­ness model, even though it’s not totally clear on a first look.

The Google busi­ness model: advertising

When you look at Google’s rev­enue, it becomes imme­di­ately clear that search is not really what the com­pany is about: Google is in the busi­ness of adver­tis­ing and search is the way in which it tar­gets its adver­tis­ing prop­erly. Viewed in that prism, Google is an adver­tis­ing com­pany and adver­tis­ing com­pa­nies gen­er­ally need a cou­ple of things: eye­balls and data about those eyeballs.

The first part of this is easy to under­stand: eye­balls, to an adver­tis­ing com­pany, rep­re­sent the inven­tory it has avail­able for sale. How­ever, eye­balls in and off them­selves are pretty use­less. The com­mon mis­con­cep­tions made by many com­pa­nies in the late 90s was that eye­balls alone were impor­tant. The truth is that, with­out any other type of infor­ma­tion, eye­balls are close to useless.

How­ever, the more infor­ma­tion you have about a set of eye­balls, the more use­ful it becomes. This was the real­iza­tion that Google made when it moved the adver­tis­ing model on its head by tar­get­ing ads based on search terms. Google then increased the amount of eye­balls it could get by offer­ing AdSense, a pro­gram that increased inven­tory and pro­vided infor­ma­tion back to Google about what peo­ple were look­ing at.

With each new mem­ber of the AdSense pro­gram, Google gets more infor­ma­tion about Inter­net users. The more infor­ma­tion it has about Inter­net users, the bet­ter it can tar­get its advertising.

Enter the add-ons

In May, I posited that the Google Accel­er­a­tor was about dis­trib­ut­ing the index­ing work. What I failed to real­ize at the time was that Google was also get­ting a lot of user infor­ma­tion in the process: what do peo­ple look at, how long, etc… This infor­ma­tion is extremely use­ful. How­ever, the accel­er­a­tor had some issues and failed to achieve high velocity.

More deals have fol­lowed, with large part­ner­ships aimed at push­ing the Google tool­bar on as many desk­tops as pos­si­ble. One could won­der why the tool­bar is so impor­tant to Google. After all, they keep try­ing to get it bun­dled left and right (with Java, for exam­ple) and are push­ing it very heav­ily in their search engine results page. The tool­bar is all about get­ting more infor­ma­tion about what peo­ple visit.

The new exten­sions are about the same thing: get­ting to know you bet­ter. The Google Fire­fox Exten­sions Agree­ment spells it out very clearly:

By using the Exten­sions, you acknowl­edge and agree that Google may access, pre­serve, and dis­close infor­ma­tion regard­ing your use of the ser­vices if required to do so by law or under other con­di­tions set forth in the Google Pri­vacy Policy

Dig­ging into the pri­vacy pol­icy spells things out clearly (the empha­sis is mine):

• Google col­lects per­sonal infor­ma­tion when you reg­is­ter for a Google ser­vice or oth­er­wise vol­un­tar­ily pro­vide such infor­ma­tion. We may com­bine per­sonal infor­ma­tion col­lected from you with infor­ma­tion from other Google ser­vices or third par­ties to pro­vide a bet­ter user expe­ri­ence, includ­ing cus­tomiz­ing con­tent for you.
• Google uses cook­ies and other tech­nolo­gies to enhance your online expe­ri­ence and to learn about how you use Google ser­vices in order to improve the qual­ity of our services.
• Google’s servers auto­mat­i­cally record infor­ma­tion when you visit our web­site or use some of our prod­ucts, includ­ing the URL, IP address, browser type and lan­guage, and the date and time of your request.

From here, we learn that Google aggre­gates data (no big sur­prise here) and can share it with third par­ties. Among some of the data is the URL you vis­ited, your IP address (which can then pro­vide some infor­ma­tion about your phys­i­cal loca­tions), and the lan­guage you use. Those are all good attrib­utes to nar­row down infor­ma­tion about a user. For exam­ple, if some­one looks at a lot of tech­ni­cal web sites, Google will know that this per­son might respond bet­ter to a tech­ni­cal ad. Over time, that infor­ma­tion can be aggre­gated to get a bet­ter under­stand­ing of dif­fer­ent groups and sell very tar­geted adver­tis­ing. Let’s look at how Google uses this infor­ma­tion (once again, empha­sis is mine and this is from their pri­vacy policy):

• We may use per­sonal infor­ma­tion to pro­vide the ser­vices you’ve requested, includ­ing ser­vices that dis­play cus­tomized con­tent and adver­tis­ing.
• We may also use per­sonal infor­ma­tion for audit­ing, research and analy­sis to oper­ate and improve Google tech­nolo­gies and ser­vices.
• We may share aggre­gated non-personal infor­ma­tion with third par­ties out­side of Google.
• When we use third par­ties to assist us in pro­cess­ing your per­sonal infor­ma­tion, we require that they com­ply with our Pri­vacy Pol­icy and any other appro­pri­ate con­fi­den­tial­ity and secu­rity measures.
• We may also share infor­ma­tion with third par­ties in lim­ited cir­cum­stances, includ­ing when com­ply­ing with legal process, pre­vent­ing fraud or immi­nent harm, and ensur­ing the secu­rity of our net­work and services.
• Google processes per­sonal infor­ma­tion on our servers in the United States of Amer­ica and in other coun­tries. In some cases, we process per­sonal infor­ma­tion on a server out­side your own country.

If you remem­ber my first point (Google is an adver­tis­ing com­pany), it starts to click. The tech­nol­ogy and ser­vices they pro­vide are not nec­es­sar­ily to the end user; they can also be to adver­tis­ers. This is why there is lit­tle worry about Google iden­ti­fy­ing you per­son­ally but being able to pro­vide aggre­gated non-personal infor­ma­tion to a third part is what adver­tis­ing is all about.

In the tele­vi­sion world, much of that work is being done by Nielsen (the infa­mous Nielsen rat­ings) to define what the audi­ence of a show is and tar­get the adver­tis­ing prop­erly. This is where the ideas like “give me around 100,000 eye­balls for men 18–24 in the New York area” yields an ad on a sports show about a New York sports team.

How­ever, Google can do that bet­ter in that they can offer adver­tis­ers some­thing along the lines of “17,000 eye­balls of 19 year old men based in Man­hat­tan, NY with an inter­est in the Knicks and the Xbox 360, who also read sport news three times last week from ESPN, like the Daily Show and bought hard­ware and books from Amazon.com in the last 30 days.” It may sound extreme but let me explain how it works:

• The bought hard­ware and books can be gath­ered from the fact that they looked at URLs on Amazon.com and ended up on a pur­chase path as a result of that ses­sion (this would all be URL info)
• The same can be true of the ESPN.com and theDai­lyShow sites (gath­ered from the URL field)
• The inter­ests (Xbox, the Knicks) can be inferred from where they spend time in their online ses­sion or what they searched for on Google
• The loca­tion (Man­hat­tan, NY) can be inferred from the IP address they used dur­ing their surf­ing ses­sion (alter­nately, if they use Google WiFi, it can be gath­ered from the info that client has reported)
• The 19 year old men can be inferred from their email (Gmail) or usage pat­terns (this is where the research and analy­sis part come in) as relat­ing to other 19 year old men

In fact Google is so sure of their data that they will guar­an­tee adver­tis­ers that, if their ad did not get a response, they don’t pay for it. The TV sta­tion doesn’t do that. Once you’ve run the ad and they ver­i­fied the audi­ence, if you’ve met the num­ber, you’re good.

Let’s assume that you have a mil­lion dol­lars in adver­tis­ing to try to sell your new wid­get (which tar­gets that pub­lic): where would you put it?

The rich data set that Google is build­ing has tremen­dous mon­e­tary value and that is why they keep push­ing new clients that pro­vide them with more info.

Atten­tion as value

Because that data is very valu­able, the cur­rent stream of orga­ni­za­tions like Atten­tion­Trust is one thing Google will have to deal with down the line. Such efforts are actu­ally putting the power in the hands of the users and could poten­tially rep­re­sent a threat to Google, if peo­ple refuse to start pro­vid­ing data to it. It will be inter­est­ing to see how Google deals with this new world.