Here is a link to an image of a sample of my search words on google.
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v51/karlaisrealcool/searchsaved.jpg
I don’t really think you could gather much information about me other then the fact that I’m a brock student because most of my other searches are pretty random. Anteana, colour wheel, chief justice taney, cossette communications, boards of canada, benjamin curtis, and back sommi each really have nothing in common. The only links I can think of is if someone reading it had background knowledge in politics and law, because both chief justice taney and benjamin curtis were both supreme court justices in the states. Otherwise… most of these searches are random things I have interest in, or needed to refer to at some point. I don’t see my search words being very valuable to a third party but it is very difficult to make connections between them. Maybe if they chose a different sample, or looked at the entire list of searches which I’m sure are in the thousands (except not anymore because just recently deleted all my cookies ect)
For the next exercise the word I picked was: aloe vera. Randomly….
Google: probably the only search engine I use next to alta vista which I mainly use for picture searches only. Google return the first result – a link to the wikipedia page for aloe vera. Google also returned a result for ‘aloe juice’ which I expected. It’s a new popular drink. Also returned were a bunch of random medical sites discussing the medical uses of aloe. Google also returned a result leading to a youtube video which also doesn’t surprise me and there are often youtube videos in most of the searches I do on google. Maybe they sponsor each other in some way…
Yahoo: also return the wikipedia site as the first result, after two of their sponsored links. Surprisingly there were no links to the drink (aloe juice) as google did. Similarly to google, a bunch of medical sites were also in the results but they were different. There was also no youtube videos in this result.
Live: the live search had more similarities to google then yahoo, (or yahoo to google) though still only return 3 of the same sites including the wikipedia page and interestingly also the aloe juice website I’d been looking for. This really shows me how popular wikipedia is.
