Google's data hoarding is like homeopathy. It doesn't work – study
Boffins find search quality unaffected no matter how much information web giant amasses
Data, it has been argued, is the new oil – the fuel for the information economy – but its importance to search engines may be overstated.
In a paper published Monday through the National Bureau of Economic Research, Lesley Chiou, an associate professor at Occidental College, and Catherine Tucker, a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, all in the US, argue that retaining search log data doesn't do much for search quality.
Data retention has implications in the debate over Europe's right to be forgotten, the authors suggest, because retained data undermines that right. It's also relevant to US policy discussions about privacy regulations.Also at The Register:
A decade ago, Google changed its search data retention policy for server logs from as long as it wants, to... as long as it wants, with a caveat: the data is identifiable only for the first 18‑24 months, after which it gets anonymized.
It was an issue other search engine providers like Microsoft and Yahoo! had to confront, too.
By 2008, Google had settled on the removal of the last 8 bits of the IP address after nine months, and on more substantive anonymization after 18 months.
At the time, the company said one of its reasons for keeping search logs was "to improve our search algorithms for the benefit of users."
There are other reasons to retain data, such as legal compliance and anti-spam efforts.
But it can be beneficial to avoid keeping too much data around. Data retention turns a company into a magnet for legal requests and represents a liability in the event of hacking. Storage infrastructure also has a cost.
To determine whether retention policies affected the accuracy of search results, Chiou and Tucker used data from metrics biz Hitwise to assess web traffic being driven by search sites....MORE
Google tracks what you spend offline to prove its online ads work. And privacy folks are furious
