Google recently acquired the technology assets of Outride, a developer of online information retrieval technologies. Among these assets were patent rights, source code, trademarks, and associated domain names. These tools could help Google make its results more relevant to users by personalizing their search results. This would be welcomed by many, but for others, it raises privacy concerns.

Google has not announced plans for using the new Outride technology, but a clue might lie in Google president Larry Page's statement, "Outride has made significant advances in the field of relevance technology and we believe Google provides the ideal vehicle to continue the development of these technologies."

Outride, spun off last year by Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), has a number of patents and applications on personalization and for determining relevance. It was created for the purpose of applying the latest model-based relevance technology toward online information retrieval. Its technologies were designed to improve user productivity by allowing them to quickly find desired information as undesired information is purged in the background.

The Outride assets include tools for building relevance information databases and tools for mining data in these databases. Does this remind you of DoubleClick's dilemma when it acquired Abacus Direct in 1999? People were so riled up against DoubleClick that the stock lost value, and this was when dot-com stocks were still in favor. Privacy advocate groups prepared complaints to the Federal Trade Commission about DoubleClick tracking practices even before it started using the technology.

Whenever personalization is a factor, privacy becomes an issue. And the public is always very sensitive about privacy matters. For instance, Google's biggest customer is Yahoo!, which maintains large information databases of user interests. This provides an opportunity for cross-leveraging that type of information. However, Google was emphatic in reaffirming the company's intention to respect user privacy in its business practices.

How would it affect your results if Google were to use this new technology to increase the relevance of search results? Say you're a user who normally searches for advertising information. If you search for the keyword "ad agencies" on Google, you would probably not get a link for careerbuilder.com in the top ten, as you do now. The technology would serve only relevant results because it knows your habits and other demographic information, which could also be used to serve different results based on that data.

Google demurred when asked how it intends to integrate Outride's assets into its service, stating it has no specific plans at this time. The search industry is crowded and competitive, with new and better search technology coming to market. For example, there are new technology and services that index the deep Web from Quigo, FAST, WiseNut, Inktomi and AltaVista. Not only that, smaller companies are being acquired. Ask Jeeves recently purchased Teoma, and maybe others are up for grabs. So there's pressure to innovate in order to stay at the head of the pack.

Although Google would not comment on its plans for the Outride technology, its integration into the Google search engine could result in a significant improvement of Google results. It's just a question of how this type of personalization would be accepted by the public and knowing when it's timely to test the waters.