Google's New Privacy Policy. What Happens Next?

Over the last month, all of us addicted to Gmail, Google Search, Google+ had been seeing those scary messages on top of our screens regarding Google's new privacy policy.

On March 1, 2012, that new "master" policy took effect upon use of all the company's online products by the users worldwide.

Google's New Privacy Policy

Upon quick glance, it looked like the new policy was more concentrated upon getting user data and streamlining it across all the products to maximize user experience.

Primarily, as stated in the Google's official blog, the new policy emphasized upon data integration between Google search, YouTube and Docs. 

“So in the future, if you do frequent searches for Jamie Oliver, we could recommend Jamie Oliver videos when you’re looking for recipes on YouTube—or we might suggest ads for his cookbooks when you’re on other Google properties,” blog mentioned.

Which means Google will be using your searches to get you more relevant videos upon browsing YouTube in the future.

While this technique mentions one of the many possible ways Google adopts to take benefit of global searches and user preferences, it also emphasizes upon the fact that company gathers search results and stores user preferences for its own uses, thus causing a privacy issue for you.


Announcement on March 1 also stated that if users were not comfortable with information sharing, they could simply turn it off through various options. But that would only stop cross-product data sharing, not the company from getting your preferences.

Google will still be watching you!

Curiosity Alert: SEO Changes due to Google's Latest "Freshness" Update

This is really off the topic but a new trouble for some of the people maintaining their blogs and sites on periodic basis.

Not so recently, I noticed that this blog had lost its visibility in search results without me contributing much to it. I thought primarily that it was due to excessive ads displayed on the blog. So I removed all affiliate links to maintain the SEO visibility but still could not manage to improve the search rankings.

Next thing I came to know was that Google had rolled out a fresh update called "Freshness" to increase the popularity of sites that contained more fresh content. Although it did not make sense to me but it had caused enough damage to my knowledge sharing efforts.

 SEO and Freshness from Google

Tech Crunch stated as follows on the Freshness update:

"Google’s most recent algorithm update was announced last week as an extension of its previous “Caffeine” update. The so-called “freshness update,” as it’s called, aims deliver more current and relevant search results, specifically in areas where the most recent content matters. This includes things like current events, hot topics, reviews and breaking news items."

 This primarily means that niche sites that do not have much information to be updated on daily basis have lost their visibility in the Google's search rankings.

So let's hope that Google does not boost search rankings for sites churning out garbage everyday and ignore quality sites for just the matter that they are not being updated on daily basis.

Or least Google does some thing to boost Blogger.com rankings to keep bloggers motivated.