European regulations on privacy, collecting and retaining data are already much more stringent than those here in the US. A recent report published by the European Commission’s Article 29 Data Protection Working Party is recommending six months.
Google has been quoted as saying that they were the first company to make search logs anonymous and shortening the life span of cookies placed on users computers. “Protecting users’ privacy is at the heart of all our products,” said Google’s global privacy council Peter Fleisher.
The real power of information collected through search logs, however, is not limited to the first six months. The step that this regulation is taking seems to be pulling the eyes over consumers, as if their search data is not accessible to anyone after that six-month period. Most search industry researchers use historic databases of keywords that have been compiled from multiple search engines, with records that often reach back several years. The best data for search marketing research comes from a balance of current trends in the past month to three months and historical data from the last several years at the same time of the year as the search marketing efforts are going to be deployed.
These recommendations, and other European regulations such as the Data Protection Directive, serve the purpose of limiting the scope of data collected by search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft. Every third party search log collection service should be jumping for joy, assuming they can work quickly in collecting the data from the engines.
