Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

theverge.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 171 posts

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

#101

Post by tempestn »

reaperducer wrote: post #75
jonas21 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you put the word "margins" in quotes in your query, all of your results will contain that word. Similarly, you can force words not to appear by prefixing them with a "-". > The only solution I can see is for a search engine to support both styles of communication. Isn't this exactly what you're asking for? Non-technical users can be imprecise and let Google figure it out, while technical or power users can get mor…

If you put the word "margins" in quotes in your query, all of your results will contain that word. This seemed to be true at one time, but I noticed last night that it doesn't always work. These days it seems to put include results without the word, then provide a tiny link below each deficient result with a link to "must include" the missing word in a new search. That used to be the previous behavior, but now it's i…

All that link appears to do is add the quotation marks around that keyword.

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

#102

Post by Bartweiss »

saalweachter wrote: post #97
Bartweiss wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That clarification is appreciated, but it seems to contradict or ignore several of the results listed? In particular, DuckDuckGo attempted to check for the effects of fresh browser windows, changes from localization, and A/B testing or incomplete rollouts. - The study results found that the 'distance' between two people's incognito results was 2.8 times larger than the distance between one person's normal and incogni…

Frankly, everyone always misunderstands and underestimates the impact of location. Location affects all queries, not just "local" queries. That's literally what is being demonstrated here.

Yes, and I responded quite directly to that.

DuckDuckGo's control definitely wasn't adequate, but in return Google's examples ('football' and 'Paris') have unambiguous localization value that's not present for two different Americans searching "immigration".

Quite a lot of the variance was link reordering and result changes that didn't have any clear regional aspects, whether at the domain or story level. If localization is the active factor, it's still pretty interesting to know that where I live determines whether to show a Wikipedia link and how to order HuffPo against the Tribune.

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

#103

Post by Bartweiss »

wmeredith wrote: post #72
maxehmookau wrote: post #3

Why is a study required to know this? Google, surely, should make this known in their privacy policy?

They literally announced it on their blog in 2009 . https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/personalized-search-... I'm a DDG fan, but they doth protest too much sometimes.

That 2009 announcement makes several very specific promises which conflict with these results. It promised signed-out customization based on prior search history (which Google has confirmed Incognito doesn't use), with a notification and option to disable that customization.

This result finds substantial variance with no notification and no toggle, which extends almost unchanged into Incognito. I think Occam's Razor says this is about localization and device type than fingerprinting, but it's definitely not just the thing they announced in 2009.

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

#104

Post by asdff »

adrianmonk wrote: post #65
jonas21 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you put the word "margins" in quotes in your query, all of your results will contain that word. Similarly, you can force words not to appear by prefixing them with a "-". > The only solution I can see is for a search engine to support both styles of communication. Isn't this exactly what you're asking for? Non-technical users can be imprecise and let Google figure it out, while technical or power users can get mor…

I'm aware of quotes, but I have two issues: 1. It's tiring to type quotes around every word every time. 2. It takes you to the other extreme. Just because I'm being more precise than Google thinks I am doesn't mean if I have 8 words in my query that all of them are mandatory. There is potential for a useful middle ground that quotes don't get me to.

Quotes are one of many operators google has for search (1). You can build very powerful search arguments with a handful of easy to use operators. Sometimes taking the time to type in the proper operators can save you much more time by bringing you to the content you are looking for faster.

https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2466433?hl=en

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

#105

Post by px4n »

sixothree wrote: post #91
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-...

To be fair, I have noticed more and more "creep" (take that how you like) related to logged out behavior from Google.

To be fair, I have noticed more and more "creep" from Google full stop. I was hoping GDPR was going to put some sort of dent into this behaviour from large corporations, alas.

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

#106

Post by Bartweiss »

harshvladha wrote: post #40
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-...

There's a difference between Signed out, and Incognito (no cookies)! + People generally tend to miss the point that Incognito doesn't prevent sharing the IP of the user. + I think DuckDuckGo's study missed out using VPN in their analysis. i.e., SignedIn vs Incognito vs (Incognito+VPN)

The "even in Incognito" part of this is certainly the biggest result I see. And I agree on the study limitation; attempting to clean up localization effects after the fact doesn't feel like a strong fix. It should be possible to isolate device and location effects by using multiple devices in one location, then VPN-ing one device to multiple 'locations'.

One thing that caught my eye was Google's response about Incognito:

> The company did confirm that it does not personalize results for incognito searches using signed-in search history, and it also confirmed that it does not personalize results for the Top Stories row or the News tab in search.

Since it's a corporate reply, the standard question is what's not present: a statement that Incognito isn't personalized, or isn't personalized beyond device type and location. Perhaps I'm too cynical, but "we don't personalize using X" parses as "we do personalize in other ways".

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

#107

Post by puzzle »

Bartweiss wrote: post #95
sorum wrote: post #87

Here’s Google’s search liaison clarifying things 2 hours ago on Twitter. Localization shouldn’t be confused with personalization. Disclaimer: I work at Google, but not in search https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1070027261376491520...

That clarification is appreciated, but it seems to contradict or ignore several of the results listed? In particular, DuckDuckGo attempted to check for the effects of fresh browser windows, changes from localization, and A/B testing or incomplete rollouts. - The study results found that the 'distance' between two people's incognito results was 2.8 times larger than the distance between one person's normal and incogni…

In comparing two people's incognito results, you have no idea if they hit the same search clusters. Were they in the same room? Same ISP? Same geographical region? Same continent? If I issue the same search back to back in different windows, I have a good chance of hitting the same cluster. But I still have no guarantee. Many years ago, SEO people figured that some Google IPs would serve new versions of the ranking algorithms earlier than the rest. Even those were not stable and definitely not a guarantee, given how GSLB works: https://searchengineland.com/google-caffeine-now-live-on-one...

I have no clue how DDG works, but I am familiar with the Google search infrastructure as of several years ago and if you told me that the same query should always return the same identical results, I would tell you that you just don't know how Google works, even if you ignore personal results. That made monitoring and catching regressions not fun. It's better than running searches days or weeks apart, but running queries at the same time as they did does not guarantee anything, sorry.

Keep also in mind that the average query goes through thousands of machines, according to public statements. Behavior at the long tail can differ for obvious reasons. From a Jeff Dean talk, https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c...

| Some issues:

| –Variance: query touches 1000s of machines, not dozens

| • e.g. randomized cron jobs caused us trouble for a while

| -Availability: 1 or few replicas of each doc’s index data

| • Availability of index data when machine failed (esp for important docs): replicate important docs

(see also the slides about Universal search, as well as patterns such as the elastic systems and the different tiers)

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

#108

Post by pgeorgi »

xvector wrote: post #94
Bartweiss wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think this DuckDuckGo being sloppy, just The Verge. The real headline here is that the effect extends to Incognito mode. In the 2009 post, Google said: > ...customize search results for you based upon 180 days of search activity linked to an anonymous cookie in your browser... You'll know when we customize results because a "View customizations" link will appear... Clicking the link will let you... turn off t…

Honestly, Google is almost certainly using canvas fingerprinting to track you across accounts, webpages, and more regardless of incognito. There should be zero expectation of privacy when using a Google service. I've switched to searx.me, which wraps Google and (optionally) a bunch of other search engines.

> Google is almost certainly using canvas fingerprinting

Since that's a client side mechanism it should be rather simple to find out, no? (eg. an addon that injects tracking into the DOM accessors necessary to get at the canvas)

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

#109

Post by NoPicklez »

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-...

It's interesting the tone of the blog as well, I bet if that article was written today it would've had a lot more rigor around the language being used. And it would be ensuring users that their security and privacy isn't be compromised, as opposed to this blog which is simply describing what Google thinks is a great feature that the public would be benefit from.

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

#110

Post by klodolph »

anoncake wrote: post #56
adrianmonk wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Even worse: " manual". I don't google that because I like reading manuals in general.

You can try putting double-quotes around the model number. This is Google’s syntax for exact matches. For a good example, try searching for NYC both with and without quotes around it. Without quotes, you will get a much larger set of results where Google is trying to figure out what you mean when you say NYC… including results for New York City.

This doesn’t always work exactly but in general if you are looking for exact matches for certain terms, put those terms in quotes.

Post reply on HN