• Reuters, Wednesday, August 1, 2007 11 AM

Contrary to popular belief, Susan Wojcicki, Google vice president of product management for advertising, said the company is not interested in so-called behavioral targeting, in which a network operator tracks a user's various online actions and dumps them into a single profile. Rather,the company seeks to understand user behavior through the keywords entered during a given search session. "Nothing is stored, nothing is remembered. It all happens within that session," Wojcicki told reporters. Google is expected to make some $16 billion this year from the sale of keywords on its search engine and across AdSense, its vast publisher network.

The main concern among privacy advocates following Google's $3.1 billion acquisition of ad-serving giant DoubleClick was that the combined company would contain an unprecedented amount of information on individual users. "We believe that task-based information at the time [of a user's search] is the most relevant information to what they are looking at," Wojcicki explained. "We always want to be very careful about what information would or would not be used."

The Google official said it is developing a new tracking feature for Google search that assumes that the series of terms in a given search session are related. For example, a search for "Italy vacation" followed by "weather" would assume that the user wants to see weather information from Italy. This could also potentially be a lucrative new product offering for search advertisers.

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