Do we have any information about whether Google uses clickstream data from users traveling between non-Google sites?
As I noted in a previous thread (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2166256), Googler Amit Singhal's wording was a bit vague about whether URL trail data from things like the Google Toolbar, Analytics, Ads, or other systems ever affects rankings. (His careful wording, "put any results on Google’s results page", could mean merely that URL trail data never adds results to the set of all possible results. It could still affect rankings of pages found through other crawling.)
The use of such data is clearly allowed by Google's very broad privacy policy. I would love a clear answer from Google on this. It should be easy to give.
Interesting, thanks, but doesn't address my question. To be clear, I'm wondering: are clicktrails from Google Toolbar, Google Analytics, Ad programs, or other sources (beyond just Google Search outclicks) ever used to help calculate search rankings?
Robots.txt-sensitive crawling is irrelevant to this question, and whether their toolbar tracks clicks from other search engine result pages is only tangentially relevant, as one small example of the general idea.
And I'm not asking if they've ever done exactly the click inference Bing has done. Rather, I wonder if they're doing vaguely analogous indirect mining of revealed web user preferences via clicktrails. For example, noticing which sites were visited together or in certain order even without crawler-visible links between them. Or noticing which pages were viewed for the longest/shortest times. Or which pages seemed to 'end' a purposeful session. Or other deep-science stuff I can't even imagine.
I don't want them to reveal any proprietary secrets – just whether they have ever used (or would consider it legitimate to use) all the clicktrail data from all their many non-search tools to help with search quality.
Because I've long assumed that they do, and would be surprised if they didn't.
As I noted in a previous thread (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2166256), Googler Amit Singhal's wording was a bit vague about whether URL trail data from things like the Google Toolbar, Analytics, Ads, or other systems ever affects rankings. (His careful wording, "put any results on Google’s results page", could mean merely that URL trail data never adds results to the set of all possible results. It could still affect rankings of pages found through other crawling.)
The use of such data is clearly allowed by Google's very broad privacy policy. I would love a clear answer from Google on this. It should be easy to give.