The Chrome Rush

Less than two weeks have passed since the official launching of the new Chrome browser by Google, but it seems like it was ages ago. The three-color circle-shaped icon is all over. Technorati.com is currently giving more than 53,600 results when seraching “Chrome”; “google chrome” is returning more than 9 million results when searching in Google.com; and even this blog’s statistics already shows the new colored icon.

Google, however, tries not only to improve the surfing-the-Internet experience, but also to enhance the company’s learning of surfing the Internet. Chrome will give Google the chance to understand not only what people search, but also how they search it. This is done via logging keystrokes from the Omnibox (the URL box, which is not only for URLs…). According to Google, about 2% of these keystrokes will be stored along with the IP of the Chrome-installed computer. Just to be clear: These are not only the finalized search strings, but every keywtroke on the way, including those which finally are not being sent to the search engine.

Two major questions arise:

1. What will the good people of Google do with this huge amount of data? Research-wise, I can instantly think of at least 10 ways of analyzing this data for getting insights about the users; plenty of data mining techniques might be applied for that matter. However, I have no idea as for Google’s intentions.
2. Is it legal? Well, the answer here is quite simple: Yup! Every single user who’d installed Chrome, had accepted the End User License Agrement, in which all kinds of strange “agreemnents” between the user and the company may be found.

So, Google simply has the authority to do whatever it wants with the data of the company’s products, and the users accept it. Sounds like the wet dream of every data miner, doesn’t it?