Would you want your search history shared with your friends? If a report from the Google Operating System is correct then Google thinks you do. According to the report, Google has created a Facebook App that lets you search Google from within Facebook, logs your search history, and shares it with friends via your mini-feed.
So far, however, I have not been able to get to Google’s Facebook application, which has been plagued by errors all week. This has led some to wonder whether this is even an official Google application.
“I seriously doubt that this application even exists,” wrote Rodney Rumford on Face Reviews on Tuesday. Rumford went on to list a litany of reasons why he thinks the application is a fake or from a third-party — some rather convincing. According to Ionut Alex Chitu of Google Operating System, the app was made by Mark Lucovsky from Google (though I imagine even Google employees can’t just use Google’s name on official-sounding applications without permission).
Real or mockup? Image from Google Operating System.
Regardless of whether the app is real, fake, third-party or built by Google, it begs the question: Is it even a good idea? Does anyone really want the things they search for attached to their name and broadcast to their friends? We often share intimate details of our lives with search engines (such as searching for information on medical ailments). These are often things we want to keep private. How many people out there would actually want to share their searches with their social network?
I personally would never opt to share my search history with anyone. I make hundreds of searches per day, many for work, and many for personal reasons, but none that I think the world has any reason to know about (also, given the number of searches most people make every day, watching the searches of my friends would quickly get boring/annoying and overwhelm the useful information about my friends’ activities). What do you think? Would you share your searches? Leave a comment below.
