Google Reader tells Google what you Like and what to Index
While most of the Facebook‘s generation kids who populate the Internet nowadays have no idea about what RSS feeds are (but likely “follow” CNN on Twitter), there is still some percentage of tech-savvy people (me included) who take a look to their favorites feeds every morning before starting their day.
Not many RSS feeds reader product exists, and the few are pretty much all the same. The most widely used online RSS aggregators are probably Google Reader and Bloglines.
While Bloglines is clearly supported by online advertising, why do you think Google created its own for free? Yes, you guessed it: to get your traffic information.
They probably use the number of people subscribed to each RSS feed and the frequency of their visits to Google Reader to optimize the frequency of refresh (i.e., when and how often they should recrawl it) for that particular feed/domain. Then, they look at how many people open each post/link and use that information to make decisions on its priority in the crawling queue or ranking of those pages.
I bet there are a lot of subscribers to the CNN feed and some of them log in pretty often. This probably makes its RSS feed refresh rate very high and the number of clicks that each article receives indicate their priority in crawling and has some influence in their PageRank. After all, if 10,000 people looked at a the title/snippet of a piece of news and followed through, it must be interesting no? Conversely, if everyone skipped it, it must be not.
In addition to this, with every click that you do (or do not) they learn something more about you and which kind of content you like. Since Google Reader is hosted on the same domain as all the others Google product (i.e., www.google.com) the cookies that they setup after your login will follow you everywhere there are Google ADs.
They will know even more about you and show “better and better” contextual advertisements.
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