71–80 of 203 posts
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Then call your ISP! They are tracking them, too!
Even through HTTPS? They'll have the domain and IP address and transfer size, but not the URL or contents of the traffic. (Unless they managed to MITM a trusted certificate somehow.)
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> Google search is good because Google search might have been good over a decade ago but today it's trash.
> Google search might have been good over a decade ago but today it's trash. IME, its still consistently far and away better than the alternatives. Part of the difference in perception of quality may be that over time it has come to use more personal signals to zero in on relevant results, and the people that complain about how bad it is overlap considerably with those who actively seek to deny those signals to Googl…
I am specifically disinterested in existing within an echo chamber.
When I search for a topic, I am looking for information that is most faithful to objective reality. A detailed explanation of the limits of our current understanding, or why my understanding / model is inadequate is orders of magnitude more valuable to me than something that will affirm that I am a smart, special person. Google used to be exceptionally capable of delivering those kinds of results, even if it took some work refining search terms. Over the preceding decade, their effectiveness in this regard has significantly diminished.
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Then call your ISP! They are tracking them, too!
Okay? Does that mean my search engine should do that too? Two wrongs don't make a right.
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That wasn't what caused DNT to fail. What caused it to fail was that websites could decide whether or not to honor it, and honoring it would have meant a reduced ability to spy on people, impacting their income.
That was part of it. Obviously if sites had no choice in the matter then it wouldn't have mattered whether browsers enabled it by default or not. Since it was a voluntary thing though, browsers sending it by default pretty much destroyed what chance there was of mainstream sites deciding to implement support for it. It's one thing to give up on tracking a small portion of users who explicitly opt-out, and another thi…
The design is the problem since websites who don't feel like it don't have to honor it. Whether it's because it'll bankrupt them by everyone setting it, or not bothering with supporting their unprofitable users.
It is really worth it to switch to DuckDuckGo. You can throw a g! at the end of your search if you don't like the results DDG gave and it will redirect you to Google. That was the feature that gave me the confidence to switch over, it's painless to get different results, even on a mobile keyboard.
(Disclosure: I work for Google, speaking only for myself)
I use https://startpage.com/ instead Good search results, with privacy
I find link mangling to be a great test for when a service becomes too powerful relative to its users, able to add friction to its product that serves no purpose for its users[1]. Google started doing this around 2004[2]. Facebook didn't do it until a few years ago. Slack and Discord don't do it. Yet. [1] Example: a search result that's a pdf. How do I share this link? If I click on it it downloads to my disk. If I r…
It might be that one of the reasons they track link clicking is to determine “bounce rate” [0] to infer how useful the result is. That is something I would want to know if I were building a search engine and wanted to verify ranking accuracy. Though I would have thought there would be better ways of tracking this than url redirection if JS is enabled.
0: #5 on https://www.spyfu.com/blog/improve-google-rankings/ (I tried to find a more authoritative source but didn’t have much luck. If some one can find a better one, please share.)
Google does this so they have click tracking data. But they don't need to mangle URLs in Chrome because it supports the `ping` attribute on tags [0]. The ping attribute basically adds click tracking as a native browser feature so you don't need to do URL redirects. It also makes these analytics much easier for the site and mysterious to the user. Looks like most vendors besides Firefox support it. (They were pretty o…
Firefox has a browser.send_pings setting to control this, not sending any pings when it is set to false. This is explicitly a valid browser implementation of the ping attribute: https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/links.html#hyperlink-... > 2. Optionally, return. (For example, the user agent might wish to ignore any or all ping URLs in accordance with the user's expressed preferences.) The problem isn't that Firef…
> When the `ping` attribute is present, user agents should clearly indicate to the user that following the hyperlink will also cause secondary requests to be sent in the background, possibly including listing the actual target URLs.
> For example, a visual user agent could include the hostnames of the target ping URLs along with the hyperlink's actual URL in a status bar or tooltip.
Does any browser supporting pings actually do that??
Also the "Note" in that section provides a decent argument for supporting `ping`. Basically, users will have their clicks tracked anyway, but the `ping` attribute provides more transparency and a better user experience. Though the transparency part is debatable given browser implementations.
I find link mangling to be a great test for when a service becomes too powerful relative to its users, able to add friction to its product that serves no purpose for its users[1]. Google started doing this around 2004[2]. Facebook didn't do it until a few years ago. Slack and Discord don't do it. Yet. [1] Example: a search result that's a pdf. How do I share this link? If I click on it it downloads to my disk. If I r…
> …serves no purpose for its users It might be that one of the reasons they track link clicking is to determine “bounce rate” [0] to infer how useful the result is. That is something I would want to know if I were building a search engine and wanted to verify ranking accuracy. Though I would have thought there would be better ways of tracking this than url redirection if JS is enabled. 0: #5 on https://www.spyfu.com/…
It is really worth it to switch to DuckDuckGo. You can throw a g! at the end of your search if you don't like the results DDG gave and it will redirect you to Google. That was the feature that gave me the confidence to switch over, it's painless to get different results, even on a mobile keyboard.
DuckDuckGo also tracks what links you click on. Try it: when you click on a link you'll see an immediate ping to https://improving.duckduckgo.com/t/ ... (Disclosure: I work for Google, speaking only for myself)