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.