by Head of Search
Andrew Girdwood
Amongst growing concerns over the privacy of search engine users; two researchers at New York University have developed a tool to generate "ghost" searches. Will the search engines respond negatively?Andrew Girdwood
TrackMeNot is a Firefox browser extension which periodically sends fake, or "ghost", searches to the main four search engines - Google, MSN Search, Yahoo Search and AOL Search. The goal of the tool is to make it difficult for the search engines to clearly see the users search patterns and determine the user's interests.
TrackMeNot uses a static list of search terms which it uses to generate millions of possible search queries. The developers' page cites AOL's recent decision to publish search query data as one of the inspirations behind the new extension. The extension runs in the background and occasionally asks the search engines to search for the likes of "boston clock" and "croissant". The goal of the TrackMeNot is to confuse the search engines into believing that these are actual searches.
Leading search engine Google sates on one page of webmaster guidelines that "Google does not recommend the use of products ... that send automatic or programmatic queries to Google."
Google does block access to its database of websites if the search engine suspects the user's computer has been affected by a virus such as MyDoom. MyDoom sends automated searches to Google and other search engines in its hunt for email addresses to send itself too.
Yahoo defends itself against automated queries by limiting the bandwidth anyone user can consume from Yahoo! servers - an effect which leads to the 999 error on Yahoo. More recently Yahoo added cookie authentication to its search result pages.
Privacy obfuscation software such as TrackMeNot places another ball in the competitive world of search engine and pay-per-click marketing. Google's pay-for-click bidding system rewards AdWords which are clicked on often and begins to penalise AdWords which appear often but which are rarely clicked on. Google's goal is to reward AdWords which are accurate and targeted however if the number of false and automated queries to the search engine begins to increase significantly then some AdWords may be adversely effected. Advertisers currently bidding on "croissant" or "boston clock" have no chance of the TrackMeNot extension clicking on their AdWords, will therefore suffer a poorer click through ratio than normal and will appear to Google as less relevant.
Yahoo plans to upgrade its bidding system for PPC search marketing to a similar system in the near future.
Search marketing and PPC agencies can adjust their bid strategies to respond to any increase in "ghost" searches. Some metrics show Firefox with up to a 15% market share against Microsoft's Internet Explorer. The number of Firefox users who actively customise the browser with extensions is lower.
