I saw the posts around the Net about the Google Notebook Beta, and decided to check it out.

The concept behind Google notebook is simple; rather than making notes offline when researching something, use Google notebook. While you can already use your favorites / bookmarks to organize pages of note, Google Notebook takes it a step further. Instead of helping you track down just the pages you find information on, Notebook lets you add clippings of text, images and links from web pages – kind of like a virtual clipboard / notebook. Good idea.

There were not a lot of links to different areas available, but one of note was the Privacy Policy page. While reading it, a thought occured to me. Google Notebook offers spammers a new tool to manipulate results.

One of the challenges any search engine faces, and is constantly working on improving on is relevance (duh!). The final arbiter of relevance is the human users. Imagine someone uses Google Notebook to plan a trip the Washington D.C. They make ‘clippings’ from within certain web pages of certain monuments, galleries, restaurants, etc. It’s a given that to do the research, a fair bit of their travels includes searching. Now imagine that 1000 people plan the same trip, using Notebook. What are the commonalities across their clippings? There is nothing in Google Notebook’s privacy statement, as written today, which prevents Google for looking for those commonalities, and using that data to improve both search results. Is this smart? Sure – relevance is everything in search. But does it open up a new opportunity for spammers? Definitely.

It would be a major undertaking to use Notebook in this way. At first glance, one would think it’s an unsurmountable task. But then, people are getting paid to click particular ads every day. Is it so hard to believe that the same people could not be paid to “clip” particular information every day?