Facebook Relays Politicians’ Views On Privacy

Politicians are perhaps not the best people to talk to about privacy; they intentionally thrust themselves into the spotlight, and can be responsible for annoying commercials and phone calls that bother the rest of us at home.  Still, Facebook arguably accomplished something today by discussing privacy with six politicians and the CEO and of the Family Online Safety Institute.

In recognition of Data Privacy Day, Facebook posted quotes from the Chairman of the French Data Protection Commission, the Australian Privacy Commissioner, the Information and Privacy Commissioner for Ontario, and three U.S. representatives (along with the aforementioned CEO).  This demonstrates that Facebook's at least thinking about privacy.

It also indicates that Facebook is on fairly decent terms with all of these individuals.  Most of the quotes were meaningless and/or self-promotional, and we won't bore you by repeating even half of them.  But the fact that the politicians supplied them is interesting; you probably wouldn't find these folks dealing with a company they disliked or considered too controversial.

So a couple of takeaway points might be that Facebook has your best interests at heart and possesses friends in high places. 

As for privacy-related advice, we'll just relay the words of Stephen Balkam, the Family Online Safety Institute's CEO.  He wrote that too few people "read privacy policies and set privacy settings.  Data Privacy Day is a good time to think about what information you are revealing about yourself on the web and take the time to talk to kids about the content you are posting and where you are posting it."

Have You Read This?

> Privacy Search Engine Offers Anonymous Web Browsing

> Canada's Privacy Commissioner Probes Facebook Again

> Google Celebrates Data Privacy Day

Facebook Relays Politicians’ Views On Privacy

Politicians are perhaps not the best people to talk to about privacy; they intentionally thrust themselves into the spotlight, and can be responsible for annoying commercials and phone calls that bother the rest of us at home.  Still, Facebook arguably accomplished something today by discussing privacy with six politicians and the CEO and of the Family Online Safety Institute.

In recognition of Data Privacy Day, Facebook posted quotes from the Chairman of the French Data Protection Commission, the Australian Privacy Commissioner, the Information and Privacy Commissioner for Ontario, and three U.S. representatives (along with the aforementioned CEO).  This demonstrates that Facebook's at least thinking about privacy.

It also indicates that Facebook is on fairly decent terms with all of these individuals.  Most of the quotes were meaningless and/or self-promotional, and we won't bore you by repeating even half of them.  But the fact that the politicians supplied them is interesting; you probably wouldn't find these folks dealing with a company they disliked or considered too controversial.

So a couple of takeaway points might be that Facebook has your best interests at heart and possesses friends in high places. 

As for privacy-related advice, we'll just relay the words of Stephen Balkam, the Family Online Safety Institute's CEO.  He wrote that too few people "read privacy policies and set privacy settings.  Data Privacy Day is a good time to think about what information you are revealing about yourself on the web and take the time to talk to kids about the content you are posting and where you are posting it."

Have You Read This?

> Privacy Search Engine Offers Anonymous Web Browsing

> Canada's Privacy Commissioner Probes Facebook Again

> Google Celebrates Data Privacy Day

Get Your Breadcrumbs in Google for More Links in Results

Last summer it was discovered that Google was testing breadcrumbs in search results (breadcrumbs being the hierarchical display commonly used in site navigation. For example: Home Page>Product Page>Product A Page). Then in mid-November, Google announced that it was rolling out the use of breadcrumbs in search results on a global basis. What this means for webmasters is that if you can get your breadcrumbs into Google's results, you essentially have more links on the results page. You have a separate link for each page in the breadcrumb trail.

Do your site's breadcrumbs show up in Google's results? Comment here.

The company said they would only be used in place of some URLs, mainly ones that don't give the added context of a link the way that breadcrumbs do. Interestingly, there seems to be an incentive for those who go the breadcrumb route because of the multiple links that you just don't get with regular search results.

Google's move was generally well received. This was reflected in the comments from WebProNews readers on our past coverage. For example, a commenter going by the handle Stupidscript said, "It's definitely a good time to start wrapping your head around the notion of 'providing context', because the web is heading into its "semantic" period ... where each link will be more or less valuable based on its relationships with and context to information found behind other links."

Google's use of breadcrumbs in search results is the focus of a recently submitted question to the Google Webmaster Central team. The question was, "Google is showing breadcrumb URLs in SERPs now. Does the kind of delimiter matter? Is there any best practice? What character to use is best? > or | or / or???" Google's Matt Cutts responded:

Matt says you should have a set of delimited links on your site that accurately reflect your site's hierarchy. He also notes, however, that it is still in the "early days" for breadcrumbs.

"Think about the situation with sitelinks," he says. "Whenever we started out with sitelinks, it took a while before...for example, we added the ability in Google Webmaster Tools where you could remove a sitelink that you didn't like or that you thought was bad. So we started out, and we did a lot of experiments, and we've changed the way that sitelinks look several times. And we have different types of sitelinks (within a page, and the standard ones you're familiar with). So we've iterated over time."

In this same way, he says, Google is in the early stage with breadcrumbs and he has seen different experiments with them. For example, there have been prototypes where the breadcrumbs were in the rich snippet gray line, above the regular snippet. "Having it in the URL is kind of nice, but it could still change over time," he says.

He says the best advice he can give is to make sure you have a set of delimited links that accurately reflect your site's hierarchy, and that will give you the best chance of getting breadcrumbs to show up in Google, but Google will continue to work on ways to improve breadcrumbs. He says any new announcements about it will likely be made on the Google Webmaster blog.

While Matt doesn't exactly lean toward one way or another with regards to which character to use as asked about in the submitted question, all of the examples I have seen highlighted show the ">" used. That includes examples from Google's original announcement on the inclusion of breadcrumbs (if you see other ways, please point them out in the comments). Based on that, if I were going to choose one, I'd go with that.

There are three types of breadcrumbs (as described here): path, location, and attribute. Path breadcrumbs show the path that the user has taken to arrive at a page, while location breadcrumbs show where the page is located in the website hierarchy. Attribute breadcrumbs give information that categorizes the current page. Obviously, location breadcrumbs would be the ones Google is using (although with personalized search becoming more of a factor, who knows in the future?).

Update: In the comments, one reader says:

My site breadcrumb is seperated by |. Somehow, Google seems to put the > character in of their own accord. I've seen many results with breadcrumbs in the SERPS, and I havn't seen any with a seperating character other than >. I do think Google puts in the > character regardless of your site's seperating delimiter.

Have you seen an increase in clickthrough from breadcrumbs in Google resutls? Discuss here.

Have You Read This?

> Google Rolls Out Breadcrumb Display in SERPs

> Google Makes it Easier to Tell Where Results Originate From

> Get More Links in Your Actual Google Results

Google’s Year in Custom Search

Google's Custom Search turned three in 2009, and it had arguably its biggest year to date. The technology is powering "many tens of millions" of queries a day on millions of sites, according to the company.

As many others are doing, Google is reminiscing about the year that is almost over, and reflecting upon some of its accomplishments. The Custom Search Team specifically is reflecting on some of its highlights for 3009.

Google lists the following as key developments for the year in custom search:

• integration with several hosters to bring Custom Search to your doorstep
• enabled support for rich snippets, giving you more control over presentation of results
• it's now easier for you to promote specific content to the top of your search results
• we deployed contextual search within Blogger, Google Sites and Wikipedia
• automatic transliteration is now integrated into the search box
• improved results rendering flexibility with the Custom Search Element
• plug-n-play with themes for enhanced customizability of results look and feel
• added support for structured metadata and the ability to restrict results by specific attributes
• we got you ready for the growing population of users searching your websites with mobile devices, such as Android phones, iPhone, iPod Touch, Palm Pre, etc.

Google promises additional metadata support in the new year, with more results customization and other features for Custom Search. With that in mind, it may be a good time to give Google you feedback, if you are a user of Custom Search. They're openly requesting it.
 

Have You Read This?

> Google Does Some New Things with Custom Search

> Google Launches Custom Search For Smartphones

> AdSense For Search, Custom Search Come Together

Next Page »