In an age where a billion-dollar company can come crashing down even before you can say “refresh,” Internet companies, even the giant search engines are doing everything they can to incorporate themselves in every aspect of people’s lives in order to remain relevant.
MSN recently introduced Bing Entertainment, Google is butting in everyone’s business by getting into Social Networking and Travel, and Yahoo… well, the big Purple exclamation point is gearing towards a more subtle approach.
According to their researchers in Barcelona, they are looking into tailor-fitting search results to fit an individual’s demographic information (age, gender, education). After all, there are a lot of ambiguous search terms out there, and the relevance of these terms largely depends on a person’s background. For instance, “women searching for ‘wagner’ probably wants the 18th-century German composer, while for men in the US ‘wagner’ is a paint sprayer.”
Moreover, search engines may also start playing “follow the cursor” as research apparently indicates that 70% of users move the mouse with the text that they’re following on screen. So what will their cursor spying mean for us? Well, being able to track what people are interested in reading will allow companies to place more appropriate ads on a certain page.
[via NewScientist and Search Engine Reviews]
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