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Comment by barredo | Hacker News Reader

tl;dr: web analytics company starts claiming bullshit about privacy in search engines

Also, in other news: some people start claiming bullshit about issues than are better for other people but bad for them.

ps. I did upvote this post in HN just for the sake of discussion and comments, but I don't like the tone of the original poster with his 'HN hipsters' and 'BS' all around.

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IMHO his argument seems valid. My site's Google Analytics tells me what were the search terms and which search engine sent me the traffic. Why not share that with the web masters if that can help them create better content or tweak their SEO?

I did not say it wasn't valid I said i didn't like the tone. Compare the post with something like:

"Look, search analytics are important to the webmasters because X, Y & Z. If search engines start to implement this option we could do A, B & C, but that will make the site owner job more difficult because knowing where your visitors come its huge and too important."

My first line before I submitted the comment was "Barring the tone and 'HN hipsters' terms...IMHO.." but I deleted that in the last moment thinking it wasn't adding any value. But looks like I should have retained it :)

im not fully convinced that the argument is valid. he's claiming that our privacy is unaffected but his business is. so that really makes me ask, what right does he have to our actions that do not take place on his site? it leads us to his site, but not on his site. it seems like he is simplifying the situation to make it seem like there is no benefit to the user. if it was optional to share that information with the webmaster, thats fine because its data about us and we can do what we want with it. funny thing is, it is optional.

Us users don't want google to direct us to the site with the best SEO guys on any given topic - we want them to direct us to the sites that are most likely to contain the data we are searching for.

Google's job, to stay on top of the search engine market, is to keep delivering good results to those doing searches - that's how they keep their audience, and keep selling ads.

A Facebook advertiser could make the same argument about having access to more user data. Most people probably think their searches are private already.

Let's not forget we, the webmasters, create the content for Google to serve as search results...

The least they can do is help us out!

Because sending us 80% of our traffic is not enough help?

Are you arguing that the web would be 80% less popular if google disappeared? Point being, they're king of the search hill for now and the foreseeable future, but it's not like no one else could replace them.

I meant no offense. I'm an HN hipster myself. I can see how it could be offensive, so I'll remove it. I really didn't mean anything by it though. I also wasn't expecting a HN post but within 30 minutes of hitting 'publish' it was the #1 story on HN, so... yeah.

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