Search engines are engaged in a privacy war vying to outdo each other about the degree of anonymity they confer on those that use their services and the degree to which they engage in behavioural targeting.

What is behavioural targeting?
Behavioural targeting is the serving of ads to a specific user based on data stored about them which records their interests, sites they visit and past search history.

So far, Google has done the expected thing and behaved like the champion of the little person refusing to engage in behavioural targeting which the more corporate minded Yahoo!, AOL and MSN use as a matter of course and offering a degree of anonymity which at least matches the other two. So Google is still the Search Engine in the White Hat here.

Why should you care?

Two reasons really and they both affect you, personally, and your business and SEO activities.

Let’s take the personal one first. As a surfer you are used to the internet being global, faceless and anonymous, allowing you the freedom to roam anywhere from the privacy of your PC or laptop. The moment your search history and data are stored somewhere you will begin to get a little uncomfortable, particularly if, the slightly iffy site you visited one day when you had little to do and were suffering from curiousity or boredom begins to affect both the quality and tone of the targeted adverts that come up every time you use the search engine box.

Advertisers see behavioural targeting as a good thing. Consumers and online surfers feel it’s an invasion of privacy and are less welcoming. The result is that those search engines which employ behavioural targeting will begin to attract fewer users which will lead to a further shrinkage of their market share in terms of search.

This now impacts on you as an online business person engaged in search engine optimising your website.

With Yahoo! MSN and AOL engaging in behavioural targeting online surfers who had not previously used Google are beginning to flock to that search engine. This makes Google’s website optimisation guidelines all the more important and it also makes the Google database even more crowded than before as more and more website owners begin to concentrate their efforts on optimising their websites for this particular search engine.

Should you worry? Provided you are being careful to optimise your site correctly the answer should be ‘no’.

But you should be aware that Google, by default, is going to get an increased market share of search engine surfers and by association surf engine business. On the basis that your time is valuable, when you spend it optimising your website, spend it where it is going to do the most good.