Is Microsoft Really Changing - Search Champs v4 Initial View
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Saturday, January 28, 2006
My partner at ideacodes Emily Chang and I were recently invited to participate in Microsoft's Search Champs v4 this past week. In short Search Champs is brainstorming session between Microsoft designers, developers, project managers, and executives and a group of 57 internet thinkers and doers from around the world.
The sessions were were held at the Microsoft HQ in Redmond Washington. All participants had to sign a Microsoft nondisclosure agreement (NDA) so most of what we saw and talked about cannot be blogged about. The majority of what was demoed to us was pre-alpha or soon to be released products. There were several announcements that were made to the group that were non-NDA.
By far the one that impressed me the most was the launch that day of Microsoft
Live Labs and some great improvements to
live.com. I'll be doing more involved posts about those after a few more days of research and testing.
Another non-NDA issue that was discussed that interested me as a was MSN's recent privacy issue with Yahoo and Google. In two short non-technical sessions, one held over lunch, several Microsoft executives and lawyers discussed the recent privacy issues they were involved in with Yahoo and Google. I read about the controversy as it was happening, and it seemed as though Google was doing the "right thing" by fighting the government subpoena's for search query information. Once again Microsoft and Yahoo looked like the bad guys.
From what we were told Microsoft did not give away any personal identifiable information (PII). All they gave away was how many times a search term was searched for. No IP information was given up. The information that was given up is actually already publicly accessible through keyword auction statistics. In my opinion the whole thing was blown out of proportion, and Google used this rather small request for PR purposes. I believe Microsoft did the right thing and Google - well huh - I'm not sure. Additionally, the government didn't even need to subpoena these documents and pay the lawyers to do this at $300 + dollars per hour. They could have easily done this themselves.
Some larger issues did come out of this discussion. As we have all thought the major search engines do collect IP address and associated them with the search queries. This time the government didn't push for PII but in the future they could. One Idea that was brought up by our group was blurring two of the IP number so it is no longer identifiable with the user. This would be a key change in the way search engines do business today and would protect all of us.
Microsoft discussed the idea of providing short bulleted lists at the top of the legalize written in easy to understand language so users would know what their rights really were. Several innovative ideas were brought up by participants to protect and inform the public. In his very own and animated way
Merlin Mann suggested having what amounts to a comparative privacy rating system. Basically a way to compare how much privacy you are giving up for any given task. A great idea! Other thoughts discussed by the champs were some kind of a privacy standard that all major search engines follow. So no matter where you search you know your privacy is respected. One final thought that I brought up at the open lunch session was to have a Creative Commons type privacy license. I personally don't care if the document is 10 pages as long as I can understand it.
This is just my spin on this topic.
Hear a after hours group discussion of this topic by some other notable Search Champs led by
Joshua Porter.
I've never been a huge fan of Microsoft even though my first computer was an 8088 running DOS v3. Shortly after I switched to an Apple 2c and didn't look back until I started making websites in 1995 and purchased a windows machine for testing platform compatibility. I've had one ever since however, the law suits and their business practices bothered me.
We all wondered when Bill made his announcement that Microsoft was changing if it would indeed come true. As I will post over the next several days I do believe they may have woken up and are on a new road.
Please stay tuned over the next few days for more juicy bits!
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Comments on this post
Harry Maugans on 05/28 at 09:57 PM
Microsoft is only changing for the worse. :(
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