As someone who makes more purchases online than off, I realize that buying online requires a great deal of faith in the merchant. You have to believe that they are going to deliver what you ordered in a timely fashion. Many times this takes a higher degree of communication to manage customer expectations and increase satisfaction. For example, I recently bought a computer directly from a major computer manufacturer. I have bought several computers from this company over the past couple of years, so they have my account information on file. Well it turns out that the credit card that they had on file for me was one that I had reported lost a couple of weeks prior. Obviously the charge didn't go through and my order was canceled. Now up until this point, the company had done what any merchant would have done. No money, no computer. The problem arose when they failed to let me know that my order was cancelled. So here I am, eagerly awaiting the arrival of my new computer, completely unaware that there is a problem. Had I not called them to see where the computer was, I would have never known. Internet merchants really need to go the extra mile to ensure that they are effectively communicating with their customers. This is the only way to gain that level of cusumer trust that is essential to repeat business.

Google tops the headlines again with their refusal to appease the US Government's request for their search logs. I think it's obvious why Google would deny such a request as it clearly raises some privacy issues that would likely impact their user-base. What is not so obvious is why the other engines (AOL, MSN & Yahoo!) so easily gave up their search log data. Are AOL, MSN and Yahoo! not afraid to scare off their users? I think that the users of these engines have a right to be scared. All of the major search engines are offering more and more services. Many of these services require some sort of registration. One would have to believe that ALL of the major engines are able to track the search behavior for logged-in users. Maybe the information that the Government is currently asking for does not pose any serious privacy concerns, but it certainly does open the door for more PII (Personally Identifiable Information) to be disseminated in the future. So it appears that this yet another example where Google takes the moral high road and chooses to do things right and it will no doubt cement the loyalty of their users.