Microsoft Is Calling For Industry-Wide Privacy Standards

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

Leave it to Microsoft. Just when we were about to count them out of the search engine race altogether they go and support something like this.

Privacy is an important concern to a lot of people. So far, Google has led the search engines in protecting privacy, though many people say that the largest search engine in the world doesn’t do enough. An 18-month record of searches is what Google settled on, but in Europe that just isn’t good enough. So privacy advocates, and that includes Microsoft and MSN Live, are calling for a 6-month commitment for all search engines to hold search data and protect anonymity.

What would that do for the SEO industry? Quite frankly, it would drive a nail into the side of many SEO companies because we rely on data too. The problem is that individual data must be used to report trends and general data across wide demographics. Unless that information is stored and recorded, it may not be available. It sometimes takes 6 months or longer for some data to come to the top and be analyzed. Nevertheless, if we can work out the data inefficiencies then privacy is a good thing.