Second-tier search engine Ask.com has tried to expand its share of the search market throughout 2007 with user-friendly features and user-sensitive privacy initiatives.

For example, Ask.com paced the big tier-one search engines (Google in May, Yahoo! and Microsoft by September) by offering Universal Search Results: Returning multimedia (video, images, maps, audio feeds) plus localized search results. Like the Big 3 engines, Ask no longer asks search users to click on the “right” database to search on Videos or Maps; and some local searches no longer demand localization keywords, like city or zip code. (You may have seen Ask’s offline electronic advertising on this universal search feature. Spots were themed “Instant Get-ification” and closed with the challenge: Can your search engine do this?)

Ensuring Privacy by Erasing the Breadcrumb Trail

Next, Ask.com proactively addressed concerns about privacy of search user data — search behaviors, search histories, identities, IP addresses, session IDs and all those behavioral beacons, cookies and personally identifiable stored data. That’s the breadcrumb trail data that powers the engines of personalized search marketing.

Ask worked with consumer advocates seeking more control over personal data used for web searches and online advertising. Earlier this year, Ask announced a data retention policy that promised to “disassociate” users’ search histories from user IP addresses and identities … after 18 months.

Ask also sided with Microsoft, tech leaders and watchdog academics (such as Harvard University’s Ben Edelman, interviewed by Tech News World) to push for global privacy principles for data collection, use and protection.  (If you do any pay-per-click or paid advertising in Europe, you know the European Union’s privacy and data-retention standards are much stricter than what passes privacy muster in these wilder western markets of North America.)

Erasing All Traces?

Now Ask offers a new tool called the “AskEraser.” When activated by a search user’s click at Ask’s home page, the AskEraser deletes cookies, search queries, text entered in the search box, IP addresses and User/Session IDs from Ask.com servers.  Erasing that personally identifiable data trail should satisfy the most stringent user privacy advocates, who are concerned about the linking, tracking and association of databases for future profiling, email promotions and online ad targeting.

Of course, the AskEraser is less welcome to online marketers, as the erasures tend to block the best programmed plans for personalization and web behavior analytics. (Remember advertising industry gasps over home video recordings that let viewers fast forward through taped commercials – skip right over them!! Think of the AskEraser as a high-tech, digital fast forward button on the remote, in terms of the sand it throws in advertising tracking gears.)

Enter the Ad Revenue Goliath Google

“Ask is in a tough spot,” Harvard University professor Edelman noted to TechNewsWorld. Because Ask.com feeds Google Sponsored Ads into its search results, and because Ask still passes user search data on to its partner Google, that AskEraser only works on Ask’s data servers.

Ask’s arrangement to share search data for Google ad-serving programs means Ask.com has already transferred its users’ search data to Google’s servers … before users ever activate the AskEraser. The fine print in an Ask.com statement admits that the new tool cannot erase a user’s search activity from third-party servers on which sponsored search results and other features rely. 

At fiscal year-end June 2007, Google’s ad revenue had grown to $13.3 Billion, ranking it first among the Big Three search engines. No surprise there; but the top-heavy nature of Google’s dominance of search ads is somewhat more surprising. Faster-growing Microsoft ranks third in the contests, with only one-seventh of Google’s ad revenues ($1.84 Billion). That’s what Microsoft legal counsel Brad Smith said to a Congressional committee investigating whether Google’s bid to buy DoubleClick display (not search) ad-serving network should be blocked as anticompetitive. Smith noted that Google already dominates search advertising; and the DoubleClick sale would give Google a dominant gateway position over all online advertising.

So while Ask.com has taken valuable steps to give its search users more control over their own online data privacy, Ask’s contract obligations for Google search results served on its site takes its privacy initiatives a couple steps backwards.

 AskEraser David meets Goliath Google. Perhaps the bottom line here is that online privacy protection cannot be tackled unilaterally, one company at a time. Is it time for those “global privacy principles for data collection” noted above?