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]
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
1-11-2008 @ 10:06AM
Civisi said...
The examples all say "Your terms - iphone, blackberry, razr do not have enough search volume to show graphs."
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1-11-2008 @ 11:16AM
James said...
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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1-12-2008 @ 3:12PM
michael said...
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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1-12-2008 @ 9:06PM
kTk said...
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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1-13-2008 @ 9:53AM
Robert Headley said...
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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