Search Engines Are These One More Chance For Companies To Take Note Of Our Habits?

Feb

We visit the supermarket and are given loyalty cards. We can get points by showing our card as we shop. The higher our spending, the the faster the points we get. With some loyalty cards we are posted special offers for items we pick up regularly. Hmm if the shop knows what we pick up regularly, they must be scrutinizing our shopping.

Yes, this is the true reason for their loyalty cards. They want to know what we are buying. Which consumers buy what. Who they need to be marketing certain things to. Well, we all know this in truth, but we like the thought of getting money back, or fuel, or special treats, so we take the loyalty card in spite of this knowledge. Even our banks are now alerted when we go out of the country, and if we have not let them know before we leave, our bank cards are frozen, to protect us from fraud, but again it shows how our movements are being followed.

So now with the development of the Internet Business, we buy via the web. We may Work From Home and think to use the worldwide web to search for things we require. This may be as easy as doing our weekly supermarket shopping on line. If we do, we will see the next time we go to the virtual shop, many of the Online Jobs are sorted for us, we do not have to remember all the goods we popped in our basket last time, and which part of the virtual supermarket they are, the company’s site remembers we bought these goods and prompts us to put them in our basket.

If we are using a search engine for random queries, we start typing our query and are prompted by similar inputs we have entered before – is this what we are after again?

As I Work From Home, I often use an on line bookstore to locate specific books I may need. I am prompted to verify that it is me and not somebody else who is looking at their site, then they tell me, as I search, what other customers who have made similar purchases also bought. So, they know who I am, what I have bought in the past and what other folk with similar tastes have also chosen. The Internet Business is certainly very complex!

When we search through sites, looking for information, perhaps in relation to something we have heard on the radio, we may often see a counter on a web site, advising how many folk have visited this internet site. They are monitoring traffic through their internet site. Maybe they want to know which pages are of most interest to other folk, or perhaps they just want a general idea of how popular their internet site is, but somehow when we click on their internet site, they know.

As we all do more and more Online Jobs and tasks we would have gone to the library to do in times past, or gone to the local high street with cash, we leave a trail which is simple to follow. We are making ourselves visible to the outside world and anyone who wants to follow us in our virtual world can do it quite simply.