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Google Promises All Searches Stay Private

Posted on: Thursday, 10 August 2006, 06:00 CDT

By Jefferson Graham

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Google CEO Eric Schmidt has a message for Google users: Your searches are safe.

AOL has been in hot water this week for inadvertently releasing customer searches for a research project. But Schmidt, speaking at an industry conference here, says Googlers have nothing to worry about.

"Our No.1 priority with our users is trust," Schmidt told some 2,000 attendees at the Search Engine Strategies conference. "It won't happen. We have systems in place that won't allow anything like that to happen."

Safa Rashtchy, an analyst at equity firm Piper Jaffray, takes Schmidt at his word. "Google is one of the most protective companies on the planet," he says. "They have a culture of secrecy and would never let anything like this happen."

This week Schmidt has been deep into what he describes as "deal mode," cutting landmark alliances with Viacom's MTV and News Corp.'s Fox Interactive Group to greatly expand Google's advertising network.

"These are huge deals," Rashtchy says. "Video is moving to the Web, and Google has figured out a way to make money from it."

Schmidt says the goal was to bring Google's red-hot advertising network beyond text ads into video. The MTV deal lets specific website and blog owners take clips from MTV and Nickelodeon TV shows, post them and get a majority cut of the advertising revenue that Google will sell.

"We see this as a whole new category, an undermonetized opportunity to reach an audience we're not reaching today," says Schmidt.

He's particularly optimistic about the growth of social networks, like Fox's MySpace, which has come from nowhere to become the sixth most-visited website, according to measurement firm ComScore Media Metrix. Additionally, Internet users spend more time at MySpace than at any other website, says ComScore.

"Social networking isn't a fad, but a real phenomenon," says Schmidt. "It's not something that will go away."

The Google/MySpace deal, valued at $900 million, brings Google's ad network to MySpace and other Fox properties.

Schmidt said he makes tons of searches daily on Google and uses it as a truth squad. He told of a politician who came to visit him who said there were more outhouses in the world than users of the TiVo digital video recorder.

After the politician left, Schmidt looked it up. "We live in a world where people make all sorts of claims, and I always wonder if they're true," he said.

Turned out the information was old -- there are more TiVo users, he says. "Having the ability to search and get the answer is a nice way to live your life," he says.

(c) Copyright 2005 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.

Source: USA TODAY

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