Tuesday, November 08, 2005

YAHOO! RESEARCHER SPEAKS IN CHILE

The director of Yahoo!’s research department, Prabhakar Raghavan, gave a presentation Monday on internet ethics, search engines, and Yahoo! “Challenges in Internet Seaches” at the Núcleo Mileno Centro de Investigatión de la Web.

With increasing internet connectivity around the world and the prevalence of large search engines like Yahoo! and Google, privacy laws and web ethics are becoming very serious issues. With over 400 million users daily, Yahoo! is in the middle of the debate and, according to Raghavan, “our challenge is to use the data Yahoo! collects responsibly.

Raghavan pointed to Gmail, Google’s new email site, as an example of the internet privacy concerns. Gmail uses an “AdSense” program to perform a computerized content search of your email messages and links keywords from your message to advertising on the webpage. According to Raghavan, Yahoo! considers monitoring personal mail off limits.
Another theme discussed at the presentation was user control. Have you ever logged on to www.google.com and been directed to www.google.cl, the Chilean version in Spanish? If so, you were usurped by the computer. “Users want power,” said Raghavan, “We shouldn’t be taking it away.”

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