The Evil Side of Google? Exploring Google's User Data Collection

Google Inc. is first and foremost a data company. In the past, it competed on a level playing field by manipulating publicly available data better than its competition. By doing this, it had unprecedented success.

Enter Web 2.0. Hard drives, processors, bandwidth, and even workers are now all relatively inexpensive. This has caused the barriers to entry in the search field to drastically lower. As Google’s competition has started to catch up (MSN Image Search) and new competitors are arising, (Cuill) the search engine is looking for some kind of advantage. Since everyone has reasonably equal access to the internet’s content, leaders have been striving to gain access to private data. The most cost effective way of doing this for the engines is by collecting data from the users that already use their services. Google has been increasingly serving its users by using their personal data to manipulate public data in individualized ways. These methods are impossible to copy without the necessary personal data.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-evil-side-of-google-exploring-googles-user-data-collection