Filed under: Business, Internet, Web services, Google, Search
Google Checkout Trends: Google knows where you shop, what you buy
Now, it's not quite as bad as it sounds. Google is anonymizing the data before releasing it. So there's no way you can use this tool to find out what Steve from the office bought his wife for their anniversary. Not yet anyway. But you can get a picture of what items are popular over time, and how two items compare with one another. For example, you can search for "ipod, zune" to see which item sold better last month.
Or at least that's how it works in theory. Right now the service seems to be down. Ionut Alex Chitu at Google Operating System grabbed a screenshot of the service last night showing that it must have worked at some point. But even Google's suggested searches return no results right now. Let us know if you have any better results in the comments.
[via Official Google Checkout Blog]
So, just how good at time waster games are you? Think you've got the stuff? Well, The World's Hardest Game 2.0 doesn't think you do.
Yes, amazingly, it's possible to have a sequel to a game called "The World's Hardest Game". It doesn't seem logically possible, since if the first one was actually the world's hardest, how could another one come along and share the moniker? It made me doubt the name in the first place. That is, until I tried the game.
The mechanics of the game are very simple. You are a small red square, ...
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Civisi said 10:06AM on 1-11-2008
The examples all say "Your terms - iphone, blackberry, razr do not have enough search volume to show graphs."
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James said 11:16AM on 1-11-2008
Is there a reason you guys say provocative things like "not yet anyway" on the basis of no evidence whatsoever? I'm not exactly a Google *fanboy*, but I don't understand why people get so worried. They make "slippery slope" arguments that do not have any basis in fact. "Ooooh, Google makes anonymous usage data available so they must be tracking what you're thinking *right now*!" No, they collect anonymous usage data and let you see trends across the entire market. They're not even segmenting demographically -- they could easily ask you your birth year and sex and split it out into more marketing-useful segments, but they're not even taking that (still quite anonymous!) step.
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michael said 3:12PM on 1-12-2008
Great, as if Google already didn't know much about what I do anyways. Not that I have anything to hide, but big eyes following me all the time on the computer is quite creepy.
No need to protect Google. Maybe they're claiming they're not doing anything to leak out personal data, at least not yet it seems.
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kTk said 9:06PM on 1-12-2008
Is it just me or is Download Squad sort of anti-google. This isnt the first time you guys have taken things way out of proportion when its comes to google and privacy.
Maybe i should stop reading downloadsquad.com aswell. Cos they own 5% of AOL, which owns Weblogs Inc, which owns this very site! Is there no end to googles reign of terror?!
Google is far from perfect, so if youre going fault them. Fault them where they really have faulted and cut the privacy BS for every little thing Google does.
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Robert Headley said 9:53AM on 1-13-2008
DownloadSquad Anti Google? That's funny. Downloadsquads job is to inform, as much as it is to entertain and as comfortable as many people (myself included) are with giving Google their information. For every one of them, there are 30 tinfoil hats that don't want google to know their screen resolution. We aren't Anti-Google but we are Pro-Facts. People deserve to know this stuff.
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