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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

#51

Post by LukeB_UK »

throwaway4719 wrote: post #29
cmelbye wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm confused, isn't it an open standard? http://www.w3.org/html/wg/drafts/html/master/links.html#link... Perhaps their implementation differs, but they even showed the JS they're using to perform the prefetch in the post. It doesn't seem like they're trying to hide anything.

They kept the fact that they were going to deploy this on the search service that has a monopoly on search in EU secret until it was launched in Chrome. Before this, this link prefetching has seen very little use in the wild.

They don't have to tell anyone what they're doing. As cmelbye stated, it's an open standard. Other browsers can implement it if they wish.

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

#52

Post by nly »

sliverstorm wrote: post #45
nly wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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

Straw man. You're presupposing the existence of 'ping'. The argument is why, given an observation that web features X and Y are being used to implement contentious function Z, would you want to implement a brand new, even more insidious, web feature, designed solely for doing Z, in the first place? Technical superiority of the new implementation of Z is not in dispute.

> they already know which you click on.

I'm pretty confident that they don't in my case.

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

#53

Post by acdha »

nly wrote: post #31
acdha wrote: 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…

> 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.

This is exactly what I was talking about: the misunderstanding is thinking that your outrage changes the privacy situation in any way. The options on offer are “Stop using Google” or “Let Google collect data about the search results you click on”; redirect scripts, and Beacon are all simply implementation details for the latter option.

If you feel strongly about this contact your politicians and lobby for privacy laws restricting the data companies are allowed to collect. There's approximately zero chance that everyone will voluntarily stop measuring how well their search ranking algorithms work.

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

#54

Post by yongjik »

nly wrote: post #44
logicallee wrote: post #42

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.

...How many people out there are worried that Google might know they're into rape fetish erotica website, but don't mind Google knowing that they're searching for "rape"?

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

#55

Post by phpnode »

nly wrote: post #52
sliverstorm wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> Given two solutions with equal potential for abuse, why not pick the technically superior solution? Straw man. You're presupposing the existence of 'ping'. The argument is why, given an observation that web features X and Y are being used to implement contentious function Z, would you want to implement a brand new, even more insidious, web feature, designed solely for doing Z, in the first place? Technical superior…

> I'm pretty confident that they don't in my case.

Would you mind sharing the details of how you achieve this?

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

#56

Post by dchichkov »

sliverstorm wrote: post #46
dchichkov wrote: post #34

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…

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.

So, they don't care, that right-clicks vs left-clicks is actually different data? And that tracking a bit more intelligently can reduce user frustration? So basically it is not stupid/evil, it is just lazy/evil?

(And BTW, this is a compliment to Google, as I'm asking the question. Not assuming that by default, as any other big co they've just filled with bozos.)

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

#57

Post by mkramlich »

if you like this topic you might also be interested in a recent HN post of mine, that did not get much attention, on the topic of all the various possible techniques or patterns we can draw from in order to improve performance (eg. lower latency, increased throughput) or scalability:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8665707

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

#58

Post by sliverstorm »

dchichkov wrote: post #56
sliverstorm wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So, they don't care, that right-clicks vs left-clicks is actually different data? And that tracking a bit more intelligently can reduce user frustration? So basically it is not stupid/evil, it is just lazy/evil? (And BTW, this is a compliment to Google, as I'm asking the question. Not assuming that by default, as any other big co they've just filled with bozos.)

It could be for a lot of reasons. Busy with other things, lazy- or even about things like performance. Once upon a time I remember when their home page was heavily stripped and used unterminated HTML (e.g. no tag) as part of an effort to minimize bandwidth and improve latency.

I don't know why, but especially when something is following the default behavior I do not assume malice.

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

#59

Post by nly »

phpnode wrote: post #55
nly wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Given two solutions with equal potential for abuse, why not pick the technically superior solution? Straw man. You're presupposing the existence of 'ping'. The argument is why, given an observation that web features X and Y are being used to implement contentious function Z, would you want to implement a brand new, even more insidious, web feature, designed solely for doing Z, in the first place? Technical superior…

> I'm pretty confident that they don't in my case. Would you mind sharing the details of how you achieve this?

Monitor the HTTP activity with FF developer tools while using Google. It's plain to see that no new traffic flows to Google occurs when I click a link.

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

#60

Post by ksk »

acdha wrote: post #53
nly wrote: 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…

> 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. This is exactly what I was talking about: the misunderstanding is thinking that your outrage changes the privacy situation in any way. The options on offer are “Stop using Google” or “Let Google collect data about the search results you click on”;…

Disabling all the JS crap that modern sites layer on top of content - reduces memory and CPU usage. I paid for the memory and CPU, and I don't want several hundreds of MBs spent caching JS interpreter/optimizer data structures and analytics scripts wasting my CPU compute power - decreasing the battery life of my device.

While you may be right that the privacy angle is something that few users care about, there are real tangible benefits to disabling some of this stuff.

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