A few days ago some employees and myself received access to Google’s new “Search+” or “Search Plus Your World”. After playing around with it we noticed some interesting personal search results showing up.
We discovered our results were not pulling from our Google+ accounts. With some digging, we found a section in our Gmail contacts called “other contacts” that had archived almost all of the email addresses we had replied to. With that information, on top of our Google+ account, the search engine was compiling our personal results.
From what we had been reading, Search+ would only use our Google+ circles. Honestly, I feel like going through my email contacts is a little too personal.
What’s interesting is we weren’t the only people weirded out by how personal the new search feature was. One of my friends sent me an article from the Huffington Post about how the FTC needs to probe Google because Search+ has caused user data to be way more accessible.
After reading that article it made me think about all the issues Facebook has had with user privacy. Didn’t Google learn from Facebook’s mistakes? You would think the Google+ and Search+ team would have poured over notes and tried to avoid any privacy issues arising. It caused Mark Zuckerberg and his team a lot of PR problems and I can’t understand why Google would want the same.
It will be interesting to see how Search+ works out in the long term. It has a lot of potential to change the entire search engine world, but if they are going to make the same privacy mistakes Facebook did I can’t see this working out very well.
