201–210 of 211 posts
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does the data get sent anywhere else before it gets deleted?
Yes. The only way to delete things at scale is to ship them over the network to a dedicated cluster of machines running a proprietary fork of /dev/null. Google has invested man decades into this system and holds numerous patents on the design.
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What does that have to do with wifi certificates?
If you add CA certificates for the Wifi they probably (I'm not sure if you can tell it manually to not do that) are added to the system-wide trust store. IE and Chrome check that for CAs, Firefox will soon ( https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1265113 ) (all this for Windows, I believe the same is true for OS X, Linux depends on your specific your setup)
Internet Properties -> Content -> Certificates -> Advanced
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I have a handy page I knocked up that I use periodically to minimise my Google footprint: http://www.jaruzel.com/How-Much-Does-Google-Know-About-Me
I thought I'd been careful with the settings but I think at some point I must have missed something, fucking android , last google phone I buy full stop.
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How to reverse the damages: 1) Go to https://history.google.com/history/ 2) Select the offending searches 3) Click delete on the top right (then click delete again)
Better yet, delete the entire search history and turn it off.
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Do people actually use Google Search while being logged-in in Google?
Absolutely! The saved search history is incredibly useful for shaping and filtering search results to make them more targeted and helpful. I also see more relevant adverts, and less generic ones, which makes them much less annoying. People of a certain technical mindset have a knee-jerk "Privacy! Surveillance! Evil!" response, tuned to the worst possible world type of scenario, where the rest of the Internet is popul…
Google gets my approx location from my IP whether I like it or not, which is really all the targeted results I need.
What else is there? There is so little remaining of the actual web search engine that Google used to be 10-15 years ago, I only ever use it for the typical "local" queries that indeed benefit from knowing what city I'm in.
All the other stuff I need to find on the web, if I were to trust Google it might as well not exist. It used to be that any keyword-combination you could imagine that would (reasonably) appear on some website somewhere, would get you that website, some others and a bunch of spam. Google was good at sorting the spam downwards, but if you wanted, you could browse it (then about 10 years ago they limited this to max 1000 results even if they reported millions).
Today, you get nothing. You get a bunch of results that vaguely match the topic of your keywords. Your search keywords that happen to appear are bolded, but that's just a visual effect now, suggesting they tried looking for all your keywords and this was just the best they could find. Except bullshit because I remember the old web, it was smaller, but it was still incomprehensibly gigantic, and already everything was there, and Google could find it under half a second, with their old tech. (where did all the web go?)
So let's be honest, they're not really looking. It's like an annoying salesman, you enter a shop, ask for a specific thing (which they may or may not have), and the salesman tries to convince you that the thing they want to sell you is the thing you were really looking for.
This is what your "targeted" "suggestions" are doing to you. They're targeted to suggest you that you want that something which they want to show you.
Which is, admittedly, all sorts of useful for "local" searches, which is truly the only thing I use Google "web" search for nowadays. Otherwise it's DuckDuckGo which can send me straight to the websearch that has my answer (discogs, wikipedia, various image search engines..). It's not as good as Google used to be (although back then I had my own tools for the meta searches), but it's also not worse than what Google is now.
oh and I didn't even touch on the part where you said that better targeted relevant ads are less annoying. The idea that ads can be "relevant" comes from the ad networks, but there's no such thing. If it was relevant it'd be a search result. If it requires payment to appear between your results, then either it is less relevant than its paid position would suggest (at the cost of another, by definition more relevant, result), or it actually is relevant and the fact that you seen it only because it was paid for means the engine is not actually doing every simple thing to show you the most relevant results, but actively hiding some. Sure this is a business model, what gets me about it is that Google one day used to be so much better than this and used that credit to build something trashy like this. If they were a new search engine nobody would give it a second look.
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Gmail? Google Apps for Business? Youtube? Google Analytics?
For YouTube you don't need to log in; the rest I don't use.
It can even become rather offensive, IMHO.
I don't always watch videos because I agree with the uploader or audience. I can watch a racist dude rant because it fascinates me, to laugh at them, or because I wanted a reminder that such people actually exist. When the (not logged-in) sidebar with related videos then is filled with more racist trash, I'm like "fine, makes sense. related videos. okay. not clicking, but there they are".
Another time I had been watching videos on my Android phone (afaik the YouTube app doesn't let you be not logged-in) on a subject related to feminism. I don't use the app that often and I can't recall what the clips had been about (but probably nothing very umm "high brow"). So, the next week I open the YouTube app, find a whole bunch of "suggested" videos about apparently people calling radio shows and "guy tells those feminists what's what!" or "this guy's reaction puts feminist in place!" trash. If it had been "related" to a video I had just watched, I'd be like "fine, makes sense". But in this case, whatever I did was a week ago and apparently made Google believe these are my interests. Notice how that's a bit more personal? "related to current video" versus "related to this guy's interests". So I'm really offended and think "fuck you and mind your own business". If your algorithm is that stupid, maybe you just shouldn't use it and don't even for a moment pretend that your prejudiced joke of a "profile" is of me and I don't want to be associated with it. Ugh.
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Google has some kind of "verbatim mode" which usually works better for technical stuff. (Search tools -> All results –> Verbatim)
Yup, putting things in "quotes."
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It didn’t for me. I’m in SF. I ran this in a Safari private browsing window.
Did you block "ip-api.com"? Via hosts or some ad blocker?
Nice fallback (to just “my city”). It gets the intent across just fine, third-party failure (or client-side blocking) be damned :)
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Yup, putting things in "quotes."
Nowadays verbatim mode may be synonymous with quotes, but it wasn't always. Google totally nuked it's verbatim search... just try searching for some command line option flag, e.g. "vagrant --debug" or something even more esoteric and watch it fail.
I've actually found that other search engines are actually better at technical searches than Google is nowadays: once, I was trying to search for Ketmax, a disassembler for DOS that could step both forward and backward in code. It was neat. But I couldn't find it.
No, Google, I don't want drugs; I don't want bikes; and I'm not Vietnamese (?!).
Trying a bunch of alternate search engines in rapid succession, ixquick quickly found a bunch of old FTP server index references: I forgot the "35.zip" on the end, and, in fact, just appending "35" was enough for Google to find it. (I'm not writing the concatenated string here so that I don't alter Google's index of the word.)
The Internet has gotten so big in recent years, and become completely overrun with useless information in triplicate; I can't help but wonder if it's forced Google search to take a more generalized approach to the way they sort and index information, with some loss of precision, in order to deal with the volume of fluff.
I was playing around with syllables a few months ago and discovered that the word "exikyut" appeared to be completely unindexed (except for a couple of junk "letter combination" sites), so I used it to make a few accounts. Then Google suddenly turned up a tweet from 2011 where someone had used my "new" username in conversation years prior. That was weird, being told it didn't exist then being told it did...
So yeah, Google's index is very imprecise. Great at sending you to StackOverflow for 1st year JavaScript questions, but nothing like Code Search used to be.