Insider Chatter by Donna Bogatin

Who says Google is “secretive”! Matt Cutts is on a Googley communications roll at his “personal” blog, defending Google at every public turn.

Cutts has attempted a “rebutal” of Privacy International’s poor rating of Google’s (lack of an adequate) privacy policy AND he injected himself into the eBay PayPal vs. Google Checkout battle simmering by gleefully posting a PayPal “down” graphic. 

SEE:  Google is WRONG On Consumer Privacy and Google: Matt Cutts Joins eBay PayPal Party

Cutts was off the mark at his blog in both instances, perhaps because the issues tackled were out of his “Gadgets, Google & SEO” domain.

Cutts has no such “disclaimer” available though for his current drive to counter a New York Times story suggesting “people -powered” Web search services, such as the new Jason Calacanis venture Mahalo, render Google vulnerable.

Google is really not JUST an engineering company, Cutts headlines “The role of humans in Google search.”

Cutts seeks to assure Goggle IS enabling “Social Search: The power of the people” by pointing out that “humans,” of course, are a component within the Google PageRank driven SERP ecosystem.

Don’t “people” contribute to PageRank with their hyperlink votes in the “democratic” Web, Cutts implores.

YES, but so do well orchestrated, financialy motivated, corporate driven camapigns to “acquire” PageRank love, as Cutts himself can attest to.

Cutts on Google News:

Google News looks at a wide variety of news sources; the decisions of human editors at thousands of news sites help Google estimate whether a particular story is significant.

RIGHT, and “human editors” are behind every page of content on the Web as well, except of course for the legions of ”Made for AdSense” sites built by automated scraping (stealing) of the content others.

Cutts may prostelize that Google IS social search, but he is not forthcoming on Google’s real social search agenda.

WHY NOT? Cutts can’t claim ignorance. After all, Cutts himself has applied for a patent on behalf of Google which portends a Google social search strategy.

Why did Cutts neglect to include discussion of his patent application for assignee Google on “Document Scoring Based on Document Inception Date”; Google secrecy perhaps?

Cutts ignored his Google patent application while seeking to make a case for “the role of people in Google search,” but his patent work could nevertheless signify how humans will be used by Google.

Not surprisingly, the patent application title and description do not reflect greater Googley motivations behind the “need to improve the quality of results generated by search engines,” as per the Cutts filing.

Is a new quality scoring in store for Google SERPs. How? What about PageRank? Will users be affected?

The filing concludes with “Systems and methods consistent with the principles of the invention may use history data to score documents and form high quality search results.” “History data” may be the hook, but the Googleplex has much more in the works than a mere ranking of Web pages by chronological date of publication.

Google hopes to assess real world historical usage patterns of Web pages by real people to make community style quality scoring and ranking assessments.

Web page “history data” evaluated may include:

Content updates/changes
Query analysis
Traffic
User behavior
Domain-related information
User maintained/generated data

Google’s patent discussion of Web page “history data” brings to mind Google’s new “Web History” user tracking tool, and then some. Excerpts of the patent application:

MONITORING OF USER MAINTAINED and/or GENERATED DATA

Search engine may monitor data maintained or generated by a user, such as “bookmarks,” “favorites,” or other types of data that may provide some indication of documents favored by, or of interest to, the user. Search engine may obtain this data either directly (e.g., via a browser assistant) or indirectly (e.g., via a browser). Search engine may then analyze over time a number of bookmarks/favorites to which a document is associated to determine the importance of the document.

Search engine may also analyze upward and downward trends to add or remove the document (a path to the document) from the bookmarks/favorites lists, the rate at which the document is added to or removed from the bookmarks/favorites lists, and/or whether the document is added to, deleted from, or accessed through the bookmarks/favorites lists.

If a number of users are adding a particular document to their bookmarks/favorites lists or often accessing the document through such lists over time, this may be considered an indication that the document is relatively important. On the other hand, if a number of users are decreasingly accessing a document indicated in their bookmarks/favorites list or are increasingly deleting/replacing the path to such document from their lists, this may be taken as an indication that the document is outdated, unpopular, etc.

Other types of user data that may indicate an increase or decrease in user interest in a particular document over time. The “temp” or cache files associated with users could be monitored by search engine to identify whether there is an increase or decrease in a document being added over time. Similarly, cookies associated with a particular document might be monitored by search engine to determine whether there is an upward or downward trend in interest in the document.

MONITORING USER BEHAVIOR

Information corresponding to individual or aggregate user behavior relating to a document over time may be used to generate (or alter) a score associated with the document. Search engine may monitor the number of times that a document is selected from a set of search results and/or the amount of time one or more users spend accessing the document.

Can Google ever be a truly people friendly “social search” engine? OR, will Google continue its $160 billion market cap tradition of machine-based mining of human behavior?

Cutts is cited by the New York Times:

Google has combed through its own Web pages to remove all references to “automatic ranking,” to prepare for the possibility of relying on user feedback to improve search results or other approaches that are more directly “human powered” than the algorithm.

Cutts reaffirms his own patent application!

HUMANS BEWARE THEN, AFTER ALL:  GOOGLE IS NOT YOUR FRIEND

CONTACT DONNA BOGATIN