Google Now Personalizes Everyone’s Search Results (Even Logged Out)

http://searchengineland.com/google-now-personalizes-everyones-search-results-31195

by pierrefar • 17 years ago

21 14 17 years ago

barrkel2• 17 years ago

Google's core service, the simple page http://www.google.com/ , has been getting more and more borked and broken over the past year, and especially over the past few days.

As it is, Google has been rewriting search result links so that they redirect through Google before forwarding to the final destination. It causes a noticeable delay, never mind the privacy implications. I've disabled this through a Greasemonkey script called googlePrivacy.

Now (as of today, on Firefox), they have fiddled with their home page, so that it gradually "fades in" when you mouse over it. Unfortunately, the googlePrivacy script interacts poorly with this, effectively disabling the fading in - leaving you with a very bare Google home page.

Also new behaviour, google.com keeps redirecting to google.co.uk, so much so that I've had to change my Google shortcut to http://www.google.com/ncr and install a Google US country-specific search provider, since Google's new behaviour essentially broke Firefox's built-in Google search provider. They also lost my search settings (in particular, I prefer 100 results per page).

Some, or many, of my problems may be caused by poor interaction with googlePrivacy, but the old ways worked, goddammit, and I am irked that I am unilaterally being frog-marched to a new version of client-side Google that I never asked for and don't want.

gradschool• 17 years ago

One shouldn't fault Google for capitalizing on most people's low regard for their own privacy when the opportunity exists. If it's giving you grief, why don't you use a search engine with a better privacy policy?

http://clusty.com/privacy

Fixnum• 17 years ago

Cool, but the IP and associated search query are still stored, no?

drunkpotato• 17 years ago

One shouldn't fault Google...

Why not?

pbhjpbhj• 17 years ago

> "Google's core service, the simple page http://www.google.com/

Anyone got stats/link for this showing relative amount of searchbar traffic versus that on the landing page.

I mainly use google (my main SE) via a keyword in the FF address bar.

somecanuck• 17 years ago

Try OptimizeGoogle (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/52498) instead. It allows you to remove click tracking, as well as other features.

barrkel2• 17 years ago

Looks like an update of CustomizeGoogle, which I had stopped using owing to compatibility. Thanks.

euroclydon• 17 years ago

The kitty is sort of out of the bag with the original page rank algorithm, right? I mean wasn't it partially funded by the government. I don't see why a free and open sourced search engine can't emerge to compete with Google on pure search. Now that they are a public corporation, there will be a relentless drive toward growth, to the detriment of most of their casual customers.

dmoney• 17 years ago

Here's an idea for an open source search engine: If you could make the search index small enough, only the crawler would have to be hosted. The actual search engine would run on each user's machine and download the diffs to the index regularly, and big brother would never see your queries.

This might be a pipe dream, as modern search indexes are probably much larger than the plaintext of the whole of the web. Maybe it could be divided by subject.. I guess that would have the same privacy problem: the server would see which subjects you were requesting. Maybe you could download the whole thing and only decompress locally the subjects and languages you wanted.

teeja• 17 years ago

I need 'personalized' search results like I need a hole in the head. I use search a lot and I personalize it by using the search skills I've acquired. I don't need some unknown algorithm making unsubtle decisions. Making this opt-out is a PITA ... but it's their sandbox ...

labria• 17 years ago

http://www.theonion.com/content/video/google_opt_out_feature... this will soon be a bit too real =)

yason• 17 years ago

It seems I had had the history enabled, at least partially.

I looked at my history and it's pretty fucking scary. Even for myself. And I don't mean porn sites or anything, it's just that pretty much anything I had thought in the last few days was there, nicely listed and visible should I choose to return to those thoughts.

I cleared the whole history and Google said it also made the history paused for me until I manually resume it. I'm glad it offered that option by default.

But I still suspect they're there somewhere.

budman• 17 years ago

If you don't like it, like me, it is simple; use an anonymous proxy. Or use google scraper: http://www.scroogle.org/

foulmouthboy• 17 years ago

I don't understand why this is so bad. Google's trying to make sure you get more relevant results. If you already know what you want to find, you don't need a search engine.

Google Now Personalizes Everyone’s Search Results (Even Logged Out)

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