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Google personalizes search results even when you’re logged out, new study finds

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Re: Google personalizes search results even when you’re logged out, new study finds

#41

Post by NeedMoreTea »

netcan wrote: post #29

To me, constantly complaining about sites/companies doing this stuff or wanting laws to make them stop... It just feels silly and pointless. In the long term, companies will gather and use what data they have access to. Companies will tailor their UI, product, etc. in order to keep that data flowing. A ruleset based on permission and consent is not practical, unless the goal is "better paperwork." The solution (imho)…

> To me, constantly complaining about sites/companies doing this stuff or wanting laws to make them stop... It just feels silly and pointless. ... companies will gather and use what data they have access to

Yet every time there's an equifax or quora data breach at the top of the front page the consensus is almost always that companies should get less data, should keep it for less time, and end users should push back against the constant data grab.

How do we square that circle?

How do we avoid FaceGooBook when it has its fingers everywhere? Even if you avoid their front end services there's countless sites using FaceGooBook for logins, captcha, fonts, frameworks that can't simply be uBlocked away without breaking something.

Are we meant to simply trust FaceGooBook that data from those sources isn't added to the others?

Without the pushback of things like GDPR (I think it has parts that won't go remotely far enough - mainly national budgets for ICO enforcement), end users seem to have neared a point of "tough, you lost".

Re: Google personalizes search results even when you’re logged out, new study finds

#42

Post by aaaaaaaaaab »

netcan wrote: post #29

To me, constantly complaining about sites/companies doing this stuff or wanting laws to make them stop... It just feels silly and pointless. In the long term, companies will gather and use what data they have access to. Companies will tailor their UI, product, etc. in order to keep that data flowing. A ruleset based on permission and consent is not practical, unless the goal is "better paperwork." The solution (imho)…

>The solution (imho) has to come from browser software or w3c

What is this “w3c”? I thought Web standards are written by browser vendors like Google, Apple, and ummm... there are some others too but I don’t remember their names.

Re: Google personalizes search results even when you’re logged out, new study finds

#43

Post by Ensorceled »

gowld wrote: post #11

I'm not sure I'm comfortable which a critique written by an economic competitor (DuckDuckGo) that obscures its identity and doesn't disclose its conflict of interest.

How exactly is DuckDuckGo’s identity “obscured”? There’s the DDG duck up in the corner for heavens sake.

Re: Google personalizes search results even when you’re logged out, new study finds

#44

Post by dsfyu404ed »

nottorp wrote: post #39
basil-rash wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had actually forgotten about those until just now. I use Bing for most of my searching (I fall back to Google in the semi-rare cases where Bing doesn't work), and fake answer sites don't seem to be as prevalent on Bing. Maybe those sites tailor their SEO to Google's algorithms? Or maybe I've just grown numb to their presence.

Fake answers are another problem, I'm talking about stuff like Google dropping a word from my query because it feels there aren't enough results that include it. Edit because I can't reply any more: As dsfyu404ed says below, it tends to drop the central term of the query, making the results 100% useless. Not that they're particularly useful even if it doesn't do that...

> I'm talking about stuff like Google dropping a word from my query because it feels there aren't enough results that include it.

It's particularly infuriating when it drops the location word from a search query for info on law and regulation.

I don't care if broad form automotive insurance is available in some non-specific state, I care about if it's available in the state that I put in the query.

Edit: Why is this downvoted?

Re: Google personalizes search results even when you’re logged out, new study finds

#45

Post by KevanM »

ucaetano wrote: post #31
ravenstine wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe it's complete non-news to you . Facts aren't simply pointed out once and ubiquitously committed to the public consciousness. There's nothing wrong with a healthy reminder.

Well, this has been public for the past 9 years... https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/personalized-search-...

God forbid somebody joined the internet or became aware of privacy issues in the past 9 years.

Re: Google personalizes search results even when you’re logged out, new study finds

#47

Post by gnode »

netcan wrote: post #29

To me, constantly complaining about sites/companies doing this stuff or wanting laws to make them stop... It just feels silly and pointless. In the long term, companies will gather and use what data they have access to. Companies will tailor their UI, product, etc. in order to keep that data flowing. A ruleset based on permission and consent is not practical, unless the goal is "better paperwork." The solution (imho)…

> wanting laws to make them stop... It just feels silly and pointless.

> The solution (imho) has to come from browser software or w3c.

Generally in society when there is a natural motive for one party to wrong another, we use law to mitigate it. Technical solutions make sense, as there are always bad actors; people still lock their doors to deter burglars. But we don't expect to need to wear a suit of armour outside our houses, because highly motivated assailants act undeterred.

Saying the solution rests entirely on the client side invites a kind of arms race, where wrongdoing is fair game.

Re: Google personalizes search results even when you’re logged out, new study finds

#48

Post by adrianmonk »

nottorp wrote: post #30

The problem is, these "personalized results" have become mostly useless. For more technical (or simply specific) queries, Google seems to vomit useless only vaguely related links instead of, you know, pages that cover what i searched for. This does more to encourage me switching to some other search engine than any privacy concern.

That's a separate issue, but a real one.

Practically speaking, many non-technical users _do_ want to formulate their query in an imprecise, sloppy manner and have the search engine figure it out.

Programmers are capable of and accustomed to putting a lot of care and precision into exactly how they communicate (especially when communicating with a computer), but regular people don't usually do that. They may not even be capable of it.

The only solution I can see is for a search engine to support both styles of communication. It could either learn/guess (on a per-person or per-query basis) or just let you tell it how to behave.

But yes, Google web search could definitely use improvement here. There are times when there are VERY obvious clues that I'm being precise, and Google totally misses it. For example, my printer is a DCP-L2550DW. If I search for "DCP-L2550DW margins", it will include results that don't have "margins". I could have just typed the model number, but I went out of my way to keep typing. If that's not a strong enough signal that I definitely want results related to margins, I don't know what is.

Re: Google personalizes search results even when you’re logged out, new study finds

#50

Post by canadianwriter »

icebraining wrote: post #12

Welcome to 2009, I guess "Today we're helping people get better search results by extending Personalized Search to signed-out users worldwide (...)" https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/personalized-search-...

Google has said they aren't using "much" personalization these days: https://searchengineland.com/google-admits-its-using-very-li...

and:

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-personalized-search-is-v...

So it comes as a bit of a surprise that it isn't as light as they have been saying recently.

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