TrackMeNot to skew keyword research?

One of the most common methods to gauge a market, for whatever application, is keyword research. Digital Point’s keyword suggestion tool makes scouting out potential opportunities a breeze, and also helps marketers tackle the long tail of keyword research.

On the heels of AOL’s search engine debacle, a new, and completely valid solution has arisen calling itself TrackMeNot. According to their website, TrackMeNot

… runs in Firefox as a low-priority background process that periodically issues randomized search-queries to popular search engines, e.g., AOL, Yahoo!, Google, and MSN. It hides users’ actual search trails in a cloud of ‘ghost’ queries, significantly increasing the difficulty of aggregating such data into accurate or identifying user profiles.

Right now this is a Firefox extension, meaning the potential to really skew search data is miniscule, but what if this sort of “search-spoofing” goes mainstream? Only time will tell, but if this type of solution to aggregated search privacy fears takes hold, our model of keyword research could lead to some dramatically poor input for planning marketing moves and keyword buys in the future.

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