> Google's wants to know as much about me as possible.
Which is the reason they shut it down most probably. They can data mine your documents, emails, social networking etc but something like google reader doesn't help much. They most they'll get out of it is a few rss feeds and can analyze what you like, but hell they already know what you search for so it's useless data.
I have the opposite view - when I use Reader the folks at Google know how often I click on certain topics, and how long I spend reading each topic. My gut tells me that such information would be quite useful to their search product, even if they have already know my search history. And for some users Google will not know their search history and social information.
A similar logic applies to Google Checkout (aka Google Wallet). I would have thought that knowing my purchase history would be very useful to the search algorithm.
So I really don't understand Google's approach. Their search algorithm is their prime asset, but they seem willing to degrade it bit by bit.
I think that the number of people who use Google Reader is tiny in comparison to the number of people who use gmail, which itself is probably fairly small compared to the number of people who use the search engine.
I always just assumed that they were using it to weight web page rankings, and that it probably paid off just for that reason alone.
If a website has a lot of genuine RSS subscribers in Google Reader who read it regularly, then that shows a strong degree of trust in the source, and thus a good reason to rank it highly.
You can't really mine social networking / emails for the same kind of information. Not unless everybody who used google reader started using G+ the same way (which is not gonna happen).
Wow, that's a good point though. Does anyone know whether Google uses links in private emails to refine search rankings? With gmail being the most popular free email by far, that might be a small but significant edge on the competition. (Not that Google needs such an edge at the moment, but that doesn't mean they'd pass it up.)
Which is the reason they shut it down most probably. They can data mine your documents, emails, social networking etc but something like google reader doesn't help much. They most they'll get out of it is a few rss feeds and can analyze what you like, but hell they already know what you search for so it's useless data.