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Comment by gregable | Hacker News Reader

What is being data mined is a bit more than a user broadcasting their own preference on the correct result. The user is broadcasting a URL which is selected based on two factors:

- the user's preference

- Google's ranking algorithm.

Had Google not ranked that URL, the user wouldn't be broadcasting it. If there was some way to extract the factor of the user's preference of URLs as a signal without the factor of Google's ranking algorithm, you would be more spot on. Unfortunately this isn't possible. Also, in most cases the ranking algorithm component of this broadcasted data is the more useful factor of the two.

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Yup this is the issue Google wants to raise. Expect Google lobbying soon for some law along the lines of "clicks on somesite.com belong to somesite.com and can only be shared with another party with somesite.com's permission.". Then in some Google ToS the "user" will be granted access to the clicks that the user makes on Google's search results page... but third party apps like Bing toolbar won't have access.

A far-fetched hypothetical scenario that has little basis in fact.

Perhaps :-) Google is a very smart, calculating company. They wouldn't dedicate so many resources to tricking the Bing toolbar if they weren't interested in getting something in return. Perhaps what Google wants in return is avoiding the following scenario: MS bundles the Bing toolbar with IE and data sharing is default opt-in. MS gets a ton of clickstream data from people using Google. Bing takes some of Google's marketshare.

Is Google's ranking algorithm somehow more sacred than my HTML? Google mines that to create their page rankings. Sure there's robots.txt but likewise Google could opt out of serving information to Internet Explorer since that's the only browser which has Bing toolbar. The entire search engine industry is based on using whatever someone has failed to opt out of.

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