Ask Lets You Delete Your Search History … Yawn

People are willing to pay for the best free products with their privacy until some crisis breaks out…..

Yes, ok, Ask only has a minuscule percentage of the search market share… that said, this is still an important move and deserves more than a “yawn”.

Yeh, after I actually read Facebook’s privacy disclose, I pretty much stopped using the site. I still have my profile there but it doesn’t get used. I wish there was some sort of anti-facebook group, I would join it, or some way I could make google shut down facebook.

The worst part is, ppl actually don’t care about their privacy loss on facebook. I mean then why all the jibber jabber with the other sites?!

sigh. people.

Oh, and just one other thing, the “delete your search history” might be slightly misleading to some people, as it only works on future searches…
From SearchEngineLand:
“AskEraser works only for future searches; it is not retroactive. If you search for something, then activate AskEraser, the item you searched for will remain in the Ask servers for 18 months. Future searches that you do with AskEraser activated will not be stored.”

Ask.com (and Microsoft) have been at the forefront of doing something like this. Ask has been talking about this all year and have finally released it publicly. At least someone is taking this kind of thing seriously, unlike the other big players.

I’m glad that they’re taking privacy seriously, but the point is that privacy just isn’t a deal breaker for a lot of users. Also, the privacy issues are most critical for the market leaders, who have most of the data. Deleting user data on future searches just isn’t earth shattering although it gets attention.

to be quite honest, i don’t even really care if google know what i search for.
the problem lies with the other stuff..

Yawn?
Then why did you write this?

Boy, Ask will do anything to get their name into the paper. I can’t remember the last time I ever used their search.

Hey Kelli–Then you should try it. In the last 6 months it has become the most innovative search interface out there. this seems like another innovation, even if it’s not one I plan to use, I’m glad they’re thinking

Yawn? Ask.com just acquired a new full-time user…me. And as Thad notes, they have quite a good product. I’ll be telling my friends about this move, it’s not as trivial as you seem to think.

While not a vocal majority, I’m sure there’s plenty of people who appreciate such a move and I wouldn’t be surprised to see an increase in the number of users as a result.

Considering how much uproar privacy issues cause (most recently with Facebook Beacon), it’s pretty ridiculous that people don’t applaud a move such as this more fervently.

This is good.

Now, I can type:
“How to date an asian woman”
“How to attract asian woman”
“Evelyn Lin”
“Asian Porn star”
“Asian fetish”

I agree this isn’t going to generate but a ripple in the sea of search, but I do think *some* day there will be a tipping point when online consumers have had it. They’ll ask for anonymization (sp?) and then they’ll ask for 100% control.

Think about the reach of Google for instance, and what they know about each of us through their toolbar, desktop products, adsense distribution, google analytics, search, etc. It’s “mind-bottling” (to quote Chazz Michael Michaels).

IMO it’s just a matter of time before the major media companies have to make their user profiling more transparent, give control back to the user or directly couple value to the profiling effort. I just don’t know how much time.

yawn? are you retarded…or just live, oops I mean evil?

Although they announced it back in July and are just delivering on Eraser this is a HUGE deal in not only the search world, but for all online advertising.

I attended the FTC event on consumer privacy and targeted marketing in D.C. last month and it was a joke to hear all of the representatives from the major online players.

Each of them got up.., gave their little PR pitch on why how they care about privacy and they are doing whatever it takes to protect it. All of them are taking a re-active approach instead of a pro-active one. Ask Eraser, and some moves Ebay is making around their banner ads were the only ones I have come across that are forward thinking and doing more than what is required by regulators.

Although people like to talk smack about Ask’s lack of market share, the fact still remains they are trying to be as innovative as possible while the others are just waiting for rules to be imposed on them.

Some folks on here are just naive. They talk privacy and release some marketing bulllshiat and you eat it up (oh this is great and wonderful, oh this is so lovely they are doing this for us, oh I’m switching over to them now) and then they turn around to just do the opposite on the other end.

No one has even asked the question of why the hell are they storing that information in the first place? Why do they do business with marketeer’s that are the leading spammers in the world? The same spammers or marketers that pay them to get high page counts, so when you click on there BS website and go to it they put all sorts of nice crap on your computer..

Perhaps it’s a move to make them THE search engine for searches that people want to absolutely private. That could be anything from personal health and cosmetic issues to smut. That’s a decent slice of the pie to be grabbing.

Seems like for programming stuff, Google still whoops Ask’s ass. A search for “c:out jsp” on Ask returns the Chicago Cubs homepage followed by the Yankees homepage, followed by a page of completely irrelevant results. Google gives me “java.net: a practical guide to JSTL”, followed by other things that at least sound useful.
Not exactly a thorough analysis, I agree, but kinda goes to show you.

Having said that, Google creeps me the hell out, so I think I’ll be trying Ask for non job-related stuff.