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Reactive prefetch on Google Search: 100-150ms speedup

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Re: Reactive prefetch on Google Search: 100-150ms speedup

#41
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure they do. They could probably get that data from the vast majority of users using Javascript. I assume a concurrent onclick request wouldn't slow things down noticeably.

An onclick request wouldn't be concurrent with the loading of the new page.

How about a right click? Google substitutes the link on the right-click as well. Which creates loads of frustration for users wanting to copy say a link to a research paper to an e-mail.

Re: Reactive prefetch on Google Search: 100-150ms speedup

#42
post #31
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They use that to improve search quality by seeing which links people actually click on – a key signal they're not going to give up – but the good news is that there's a better way to do that and they're already using it. HTML5 added a ping attribute to the tag which tells the browser to make an untracked asynchronous request to a different URL to record the click: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Ele…

> Unfortunately, this was implemented in Firefox years ago but disabled due to a fear-mongering campaign by some self-styled privacy advocates who were quite vocal in sharing their misunderstanding of web privacy What 'misunderstanding'? I don't want people knowing what third party links I'm clicking on. There's no misunderstanding. I understand it perfectly. I just don't want it. I disable 3rd party HTTP referers as…

why don't you download the internet and run grep, then you don't have to leak your search terms. Seriously - why would you want Google to know what search terms you're using? Why would anyone want to pass this information to an untrusted third party?

As for me, I think once a site has seen my exact search term, knowing which of the results I'm clicking on is a small leak and quite useful so that the popular results can be put at the top.

Re: Reactive prefetch on Google Search: 100-150ms speedup

#43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow. I'd love to see these treacherous "onmousedown" handlers that substitute the link on Google site gone! Especially on the RIGHT click. Actually, I could never understand, why Google substitutes the link with the redirect on the RIGHT click. It is necessary when you LEFT click, the page looses control and it doesn't matter much for users anyway. But WHY do it on the right click? When the user RIGHT clicks the link…

Seconding this, it drives me up the wall. Little frustrations, that mount and mount when you just want to do basic things..

There was a time, a long time ago, where we don't have google link redirects in search results... drive me crazy too, specially some time it's laggy.

Re: Reactive prefetch on Google Search: 100-150ms speedup

#44
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Unfortunately, this was implemented in Firefox years ago but disabled due to a fear-mongering campaign by some self-styled privacy advocates who were quite vocal in sharing their misunderstanding of web privacy What 'misunderstanding'? I don't want people knowing what third party links I'm clicking on. There's no misunderstanding. I understand it perfectly. I just don't want it. I disable 3rd party HTTP referers as…

why don't you download the internet and run grep, then you don't have to leak your search terms. Seriously - why would you want Google to know what search terms you're using? Why would anyone want to pass this information to an untrusted third party? As for me, I think once a site has seen my exact search term, knowing which of the results I'm clicking on is a small leak and quite useful so that the popular results c…

So when I google 'suicide' it's OK for Google to know whether I'm clicking on the Samaritans or the Wikipedia article? And when I Google 'rape' it's OK for Google to know whether I click on a news article about a string of recent rapes or click through to rape fetish erotica website?

Not everything is black or white.

Re: Reactive prefetch on Google Search: 100-150ms speedup

#45
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why don't you download the internet and run grep, then you don't have to leak your search terms. Seriously - why would you want Google to know what search terms you're using? Why would anyone want to pass this information to an untrusted third party? As for me, I think once a site has seen my exact search term, knowing which of the results I'm clicking on is a small leak and quite useful so that the popular results c…

So when I google 'suicide' it's OK for Google to know whether I'm clicking on the Samaritans or the Wikipedia article? And when I Google 'rape' it's OK for Google to know whether I click on a news article about a string of recent rapes or click through to rape fetish erotica website? Not everything is black or white.

The main argument here is, they already know which you click on. They use referral links. So that's not a sensible reason to prohibit the "ping" attribute.

Given two solutions with equal potential for abuse, why not pick the technically superior solution?

Re: Reactive prefetch on Google Search: 100-150ms speedup

#46
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They use that to improve search quality by seeing which links people actually click on – a key signal they're not going to give up – but the good news is that there's a better way to do that and they're already using it. HTML5 added a ping attribute to the tag which tells the browser to make an untracked asynchronous request to a different URL to record the click: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Ele…

Wow. I'd love to see these treacherous "onmousedown" handlers that substitute the link on Google site gone! Especially on the RIGHT click. Actually, I could never understand, why Google substitutes the link with the redirect on the RIGHT click. It is necessary when you LEFT click, the page looses control and it doesn't matter much for users anyway. But WHY do it on the right click? When the user RIGHT clicks the link…

I've always figured that one is just an oversight. Implementing the behavior you want is an extra feature requiring extra code. The current behavior is the ordinary one, that you see in nearly every web page out there.

Re: Reactive prefetch on Google Search: 100-150ms speedup

#47
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Unfortunately, this was implemented in Firefox years ago but disabled due to a fear-mongering campaign by some self-styled privacy advocates who were quite vocal in sharing their misunderstanding of web privacy What 'misunderstanding'? I don't want people knowing what third party links I'm clicking on. There's no misunderstanding. I understand it perfectly. I just don't want it. I disable 3rd party HTTP referers as…

why don't you download the internet and run grep, then you don't have to leak your search terms. Seriously - why would you want Google to know what search terms you're using? Why would anyone want to pass this information to an untrusted third party? As for me, I think once a site has seen my exact search term, knowing which of the results I'm clicking on is a small leak and quite useful so that the popular results c…

Coincidentally that's what I do (to some extent). I use the following offline resources:

* Wikipedia (smartphone, PC): Aard Dict[1]

* Translation apps (smartphone)

* OpenStreetMap (smartphone): OsmAnd[2]

[1]: http://aarddict.org [2]: http://osmand.net

Re: Reactive prefetch on Google Search: 100-150ms speedup

#48

Posting from a throwaway account since I work on a competing browser. I think Google needs to check its steps quite carefully when doing things like these. For quite some time they have leveraged their search monopoly (think about their EU search market share) to bring search/browser-type integration features to chrome first. I would say this is abusing a monopoly in one market segment (search in the EU) to attempt t…

As far as I can tell, synergies between your products has been 100% OK since the dawn of time, even if one or both of your products has monopoly status. The anti-trust cases come when you start locking out competitors.

Re: Reactive prefetch on Google Search: 100-150ms speedup

#49
post #5

There is simple way to speed this up. All Google Search links point to redirection service: www.google.gr/url?example.com. It is trivial to write script which makes those links direct.

// Google Tracking-B-Gone

// version 2.2.1

// Release Date: 2014-02-28

// http://userscripts.org/scripts/upload/47300

of course userscripts.org is gone now(why?), but you can find this script on other places.

Re: Reactive prefetch on Google Search: 100-150ms speedup

#50
post #31
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They use that to improve search quality by seeing which links people actually click on – a key signal they're not going to give up – but the good news is that there's a better way to do that and they're already using it. HTML5 added a ping attribute to the tag which tells the browser to make an untracked asynchronous request to a different URL to record the click: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Ele…

> Unfortunately, this was implemented in Firefox years ago but disabled due to a fear-mongering campaign by some self-styled privacy advocates who were quite vocal in sharing their misunderstanding of web privacy What 'misunderstanding'? I don't want people knowing what third party links I'm clicking on. There's no misunderstanding. I understand it perfectly. I just don't want it. I disable 3rd party HTTP referers as…

I am all for privacy and am a daily user of encrypted email and encrypted chat. However, I think there are some activities that the very privacy minded need to accept that they simply cannot participate in and maintain complete privacy.

Search is one of these. In order for search to work, the user has to send a query to a third party. The third party has to be able to read the query to do the search. If that's not an acceptable loss of privacy, then don't use search.

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