Google patents search that tracks your mouse moves Google has patented a system that displays search results and ads based on where you move your mouse. Mountain View first filed for the patent — dubbed a "system and method for modulating search relevancy using pointer activity monitoring" — in February 2005, and the US patent office rubber-stamped the application earlier this …
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Out of interest, I noticed my default habit is to click a link and then move the mouse out of my eye line of the text I am reading and use it primarily to scroll until I spot a link I want to click on. I also notice where I move it, usually to the right, effectively hovers over where a lot of websites situate ads and other auxiliary items that I guess Google will therefore falsely think I am interested in.
Isn't there already a sort of prior art in this case seeing as how there's lots of informational sites out there that have words in their text as links and as soon as you hover over them, up pops another ad?
I suppose also I might as well stop hoping to own a dev shop someday because by the time I have a product, every line of code we write will be covered by at least one patent troll.
Can I patent the hello world example?
I thought there would also be prior art, however after reading the patent fully I now understand that it's specifically relating to changing the order of the search results weighted by which results a user has hovered their mouse over on previous searches, which probably hasn't been done before!
I use a Kensington trackerball mouse with a ball about 3 inches in diameter. It is easy for me to find I'm spinning and rolling it idly with my fingers while I am staring into space, thinking. The cursor makes many interesting, erratic, random journeys. Will I keep on doing this if Google puts their new patent into practice? You betcha!
Google is not the product, the information they provide is not the product, the links are not the product, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT!
You and all the information that makes up who you are, that is the product. To be harvested and sold off to the highest bidder. Same with FaceBook, Twitter and millions of others. The site and it's services are not the product, the harvesting of you, that is the really valuable product.
Google's search rankings are already crap because they are worked out on two things firstly Google's commercial interest and secondly by what other people have clicked on.
I'm not other people I'm me and I'm searching for what I want. Try searching for a specific phrase on google, say half a dozen words that you know appear on a particular web page but are not a common phrase. Now see how far they come down the Google ranking. Look at some of the stuff that comes above it that doesn't contain the exact phrase you searched for.
Google might be great if you wan't to buy a new laptop, but it's not much use when it comes to searching for information. Google see the interwebs as a commerce tool and little else. I see the net as a great source of information and, as such, seldom use Google. And before anybodu starts this is about usefulness not privacy so I don't see the point in using any of the proxies and the like that hide your identity from Google.
Who reads the screen with their mouse. I read the screen and then when I'm ready to click I move the mouse to the link I want to click. So my mouse stays where I last clicked. This will really skew their results since I may not even be mildly interested in the location of the mouse on the new page, but it will stay there until I have read the rest of the page.
People who read using their mouse probably trace the printed word with their finger tip and move their lips for the difficult words. What are Google going to call this tech? Google Sunreader?
Oh and those of you worrying about what you will do *when* Google implement this tech. How do you know they haven't done this already? Just because they have only recently applied for a patent doesn't mean they're not using it already. Get your tinfoil hats on.
Google have been monitoring user mousedowns (mouse clicks on results) in their search results since Nov 2003, so taking this one step further by monitoring mousemoves isn't really anything new.
To see what Google have been doing with mousedowns since November 2003, search on Google for:
google click monitoring onmousedown return clk
and you will find some articles about this.
Whether monitoring mousemoves is useful or not is another story. How many people read with their finger, (or the mouse cursor equivalent), and what about the new touch devices like the iPad and tablet competitors, and the touch phones etc, all of which do not have the equivalent of a mouseover (at least not when the finger is not in contact with the touch surface, i.e. not dragging).
Say I want to see who's posting a particular phrase over and over, on certain social sites. I google for "phrase" .
After opening up about 50 of these my browser slows down a little, so I may spend the threshold amount of time with the mouse over a result I have no interest in. Of course I am scrolling with the mouse over the centre of the links, to make it easy to open one when I find one for the site of interest.
Does this mean I have any interest in that site or what it stands for? nope, my interest is in the person(s) posting my keyword.
Now, if Google could come up with a Preference setting so it won't deliberately refuse to give me ALL the results (we have omitted similar results........ HEY I asked you to SEARCH, and I will decide if I like them or not). Another graduate of the MS "we know what you want' school.
Speaking of MS, they have prior art on this.....the Office menus that reorder their content according to what you used more often most recently............bad luck you are just about to switch to a different project with different requirements.
Google did not invent the mouse, so why should they have a patent related to mice? Or better yet, why should they have a patent related to what I do with a mouse? I know it is about tracking for marketing and not just using a mouse, but still......
One more reason to not use google or any of it's products or services.
The US Patent office is broken, someone needs to patent fixing it.
...and applying some common sense would go a long way to targetting adverts properly. Has anyone noticed when abroad that going to an English language Google site and typing in a search query returns adverts in the language of the country it thinks you happen to be in? Talk about missing the target when you don't even recognize the alphabet that the adverts are written in!
For sheer stupidity this has to rank alongside "Keyboard not found. Press F1 to continue".
This news, coupled with the recent extension of Google's images search result user interface (UI) to offer more information when the user mouseovers an image, does suggest that perhaps google might be changing its main search results UI to offer more information when the user mouseovers a result in the future.
That would be interesting if google are toying with the idea of changing the main results UI in this way, quite a different change to something that has been fairly static and lacking in the past in terms of a rich interactive user experience.
Although offering more information to mouseovers still ignores the touch screen phone and touch screen pad/tablet users where there are no mouseovers.
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