Yahoo Beats Google on Privacy

God bless Yahoo. They are taking privacy concerns seriously.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Yahoo Inc. said Wednesday that it will shorten the amount of time that it retains data about its users' online behavior — including Internet search records — to three months from 13 months and expand the range of data that it "anonymizes" after that period...

In September, Google said it would "anonymize," or mask, the numeric Internet Protocol (IP) addresses on its server logs after nine months, down from a previous period of 18 months. And Microsoft, which keeps user data for 18 months, said last week it would support an industry standard of six months.

Under Yahoo's new policy, the company will strip out portions of users' IP addresses, alter small tracking files known as "cookies" and delete other potential personally identifiable information after 90 days in most cases. In cases involving fraud and data security, the company will anonymize the data after six months.

Anne Toth, vice president of policy and head of privacy for Yahoo, said the company is adopting the new policy to build trust with users and differentiate it from its competitors. Yahoo also hopes to take the issue of data retention "off the table" by showing that Internet companies can regulate themselves, Toth said.

European Union regulators have pressured Yahoo, Google and Microsoft over the past year to shorten the amount of time that they hold onto user data. And Congress has begun asking questions about the extent to which Internet and telecommunications companies track where their users go online and use that information to target personalized advertising.

Now will Google follow their lead?

Labels: privacy, search, yahoo

Yahoo delivers major search enhancement

Yahoo came out Monday with a new search tool that wraps up three features into one widget. The features are:

• autocomplete
• related searches
• filtering

It's the last of these that's the most interesting, because the first two have been implemented elsewhere, namely on Microsoft Live and Ask.

Yahoo's usability experts boast that with this new tool, their test subjects experienced a 61% increase in task completion. I played with it and found it somewhat confusing, but I think it's a nice feature. It's an important one that I think, will spur Google to make some enhancements to its own search service, which have seen no notable improvements since they introduced image search.

In any case, helping users complete tasks is the most important objective, but the impact of this tool is going to be more search result page views, more targeted searches, more targeted ads and more for Yahoo's bottom line. They chose the term "Explore Concepts" to describe the filtering feature for a good reason: it encourages search "browsing" and exploration that had previously been limited to related searches, none of which were ever very well-implemented.

I said that the tool was a little confusing, and it is. An experienced web user will take a few minutes to figure it out. Here are the things that will cause confusion:

• "Explore Concepts" uses a two-column list and a scroll right to move through it, which in itself is confusing. But there's no visible transition to see that you've moved over one column, and the blank area to the right of the scroll right, with an arrow pointing at it suggests that something is going to appear in that blank area, which doesn't happen.
• The plus sign appended to the "Explore Concepts" term looks actionable (it actually indicates filtering)
• When you click on one of the filter terms, the whole list of filters changes, which is disorienting, especially because the term listed after "Explore Concepts" does not change.
  

Here we search for the World Heritage city Luang Prabang.

Autocomplete at work:
Using right scroll with two-column data with no visible transition:
Is something going to show up on the right?
Explore Concepts now has a new list of terms, even though it still says "Explore Concepts: luang prabang+" and not "Explore Concepts: luang prabang+buddha images+":
On the whole, a promising new feature, but there's enough there to confuse new and even experienced users.

Labels: ajax, search, yahoo