
Google personalizes search results even when you’re logged out, new study finds - dcu
https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/4/18124718/google-search-results-personalized-unique-duckduckgo-filter-bubble
======
icebraining
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-...](https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/personalized-search-for-
everyone.html)

~~~
harshvladha
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)

~~~
Bartweiss
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".

~~~
nl
_it does not personalize results for incognito searches using signed-in search
history_

To me this sounds reasonable. A very large number of searches are locality
based, and it is entirely reasonable to localize them based on IP address (and
- as you note - the device type).

It's also reasonable to customize based on recent (session based) search
history (refinements, spelling corrections, etc).

The difference between this and personalization seems mostly about semantics
IMHO.

~~~
Marsymars
> To me this sounds reasonable. A very large number of searches are locality
> based, and it is entirely reasonable to localize them based on IP address
> (and - as you note - the device type).

I wish this was trivial to disable. I regularly search for things where I want
the global result, and instead get weird local results that I don't care
about. It's much easier to narrow a global search to a local one by adding an
appropriate region name to the search than it is to expand a local search to a
global one via search terms.

------
rdtsc
I remember Paul Graham gave a keynote at one of the Pycons some years ago. It
was about interesting ideas that you might want to work on in the future.

One idea was to build a search engine that returns unpersonalized results. He
talked about how Google will be moving into a "it's true, if it's true for
you" kind of world. His idea was that it will open new opportunities. I think
DuckDuckGo is one example, and they've grown and are doing pretty well. I
think a lot of it comes as a reaction to Google, Facebook and other such
things.

"It's true, if it's true for you" is also a great phrase worth remembering. It
describes so much about the current world and where things are headed, and why
some things seemed to have gone off rails.

~~~
tmaly
It use to be that DuckDuckGo would let you contribute to the search engine
years back providing interfaces to various 3rd party data. I am not sure if
that is still the case?

Has anyone written anything for DuckDuckGo?

~~~
baroffoos
You used to be able to contribute to those info cards at the top of searches
but about a year ago they closed it off from external contributions.

------
nottorp
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.

~~~
adrianmonk
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.

~~~
jonas21
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
more precise results with the various search operators?

~~~
reaperducer
_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 inconsistent.

~~~
jonas21
Do you have an example where adding quotes doesn't work? As far as I can tell,
it always works for me (yeah, we may be getting different personalized
results, but still...)

~~~
prepend
It’s kind of hard to share links because google personalizes results against
our wishes. But a search for ‘"monkeys" burritos san diego “fries”’[0] returns
a first link [1] that doesn’t include ‘monkeys.’

There are also other results [2] that include ‘monkey’ not what I asked for.

It’s infuriating. I just want to grep the internet. Is that too much to ask?

[0] [https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&hl=en-
us&ei=P1oH...](https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&hl=en-
us&ei=P1oHXIK8FNee1fAPvaqMuAc&q=%22monkeys%22+burritos+san+diego+%E2%80%9Cfries%E2%80%9D&oq=%22monkeys%22+burritos+san+diego+%E2%80%9Cfries%E2%80%9D&gs_l=mobile-
gws-wiz-
serp.3..33i22i29i30.9381.13230..13512...0.0..0.381.2078.2-6j2......0....1.........0i71j33i160j33i21.IFT8IIfOgZk)

[1]
[https://www.pinterest.com/pin/481463016388903842/](https://www.pinterest.com/pin/481463016388903842/)

[2]
[https://www.tripadvisor.com/ShowUserReviews-g55543-d4580159-...](https://www.tripadvisor.com/ShowUserReviews-g55543-d4580159-r298090202-The_Proudest_Monkey-
Bryan_Texas.html)

~~~
jonas21
In your first example, >90% of the text on the page is in the "More Like This"
section which is heavily personalized by Pinterest. So I'm seeing different
content than you are, and Googlebot saw different content than either of us.
Given the complete randomness of the content in there, I wouldn't be surprised
at all if "monkeys" appeared on the version that was indexed.

In your second example, the word "monkeys" does appear on the page, in the
"Show reviews that mention" section.

More importantly, did you have a result in mind for this query that isn't
showing up? It seems somewhat nonsensical.

~~~
prepend
Thanks for the reply. I’m on mobile and searched on mobile and I don’t see
“show reviews that mention.” I do see “read reviews that mention” but that
includes stuff but not monkeys [0].

The Pinterest page perhaps has monkeys at some point, but doesn’t now.

This isn’t a real search, I just added something whimsical (and I miss San
Diego burritos). This is behavior I remember but don’t typically track so it’s
hard to remember on command.

Note you can use search tools | verbatim and it will return pages will all
terms. The Pinterest page is still there, but the trip advisor page is missing
[1].

[0] [https://imgur.com/gallery/Xlp8lsk](https://imgur.com/gallery/Xlp8lsk) [1]
[https://www.google.com/search?q=%22monkeys%22+burritos+san+d...](https://www.google.com/search?q=%22monkeys%22+burritos+san+diego+%E2%80%9Cfries%E2%80%9D&client=safari&hl=en-
us&prmd=inmv&source=lnt&tbs=li:1&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiA7cCViYjfAhWJF8AKHWTPBaAQpwV6BAgNEBM&biw=375&bih=635#ip=1)

------
ggggtez
I think I agree with the complaints about this study. Unique doesn't mean
personalized. IP geo-location, ISP... Don't forget browser and OS versions...
there are lots of things you can sample over without actually representing any
info leak from your logged in session.

Someone searching "at the same time" could technically be different times
(remember time zones!) for the purposes of the algorithm (is the search during
"work hours" or not, etc).

Users checking results on mobile phones compared to desktops... Without more
details of how they controlled for these factors, the conclusion doesn't
really follow.

Edit: I think to really measure the conclusion, they'd need 87 people in the
SAME geo location, perhaps on fresh out of the box devices. That would be the
best way to create the "placebo" group for their test, which they don't seem
to have done.

~~~
tr33house
containers

------
endymi0n
I'm the last one to say you shouldn't scrutinize what Google does, but this is
complete non-news.

In the beginning, I was suspecting actively used logged-out cookies like
Facebook infamously uses for example (try it, they're showing your face and
keep tracking you all over the web). Reading on about differing search results
in private mode, I was then expecting something like Google actually using IP
+ Fingerprint matching, which would be way more devious.

In the end, this was purely about Google showing a different page to everyone.
Playing the devil's advocate, this is about the only way to escape the
exploration/exploitation dilemma.

Is DuckDuckGo seriously complaining that Google is basically A/B testing
everything, all the time? Because if that's the case, their data scientists
should take some notes here.

~~~
ravenstine
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.

~~~
ucaetano
Well, this has been public for the past 9 years...

[https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/personalized-
search-...](https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/personalized-search-for-
everyone.html)

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

------
anyzen
Am I missing something? Google gives me the creeps as much as it does to any
sane person, but if I understand correctly, DDG is comparing just the
variation of results on each page. This doesn't mean that you're still in the
(same) bubble when you log out.

How about comparing the logged-in data with logged-out / private tab data? Did
they find these two sets related? If not, G could be just implementing some
sort of A/B testing on grand scale (learning from clicks and making search
algorithm better).

------
Yetanfou
I always assumed they would, just like Youtube 'recommends' videos for you
whether you're logged in or not. This is one of the reasons why I don't use
Google / Bing / etc directly anymore, instead I use them through a meta-search
engine (using a local instance of Searx [1] with some extra code to have it
search my local content as well [2]).

[1] [https://github.com/asciimoo/searx](https://github.com/asciimoo/searx)

[2]
[https://github.com/asciimoo/searx/pull/1257](https://github.com/asciimoo/searx/pull/1257)

------
matt4077
The study’s result seem to be that users often get unique results. That’s not
the same as “personalized”, and it certainly isn’t evidence of “bias” as the
spreadprivacy.org-link suggests.

A good faith interpretation would point to google running learning algorithms
on their results. That would also seem to be a far better explanation for
Google changing parts of the page layout, such as the position of news and
video results.

The use of the term “bias” for describing differences search results also
trips my conspiracy theory detectors.

------
Wowfunhappy
I think this should be considered the original source instead?

[https://spreadprivacy.com/google-filter-bubble-
study/](https://spreadprivacy.com/google-filter-bubble-study/)

~~~
nailer
So much Vox media blog spam on HN - yesterday their Tumblr story (wrapping
Tumblr's official announcement and adding very little) hit front page, and the
official announcement (posted earlier and modded up first) was marked as dupe.

------
gowld
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.

~~~
hirundo
Well it does say that it's the DuckDuckGo Blog, and it has the DuckDuckGo logo
at the top. That's not very obscure.

[https://spreadprivacy.com/google-filter-bubble-
study/](https://spreadprivacy.com/google-filter-bubble-study/)

------
troydavis
Here's where Google (barely) exposes an option called "Signed-out search
activity" retention:
[https://www.google.com/history/privacyadvisor/search](https://www.google.com/history/privacyadvisor/search)

Make sure to access it while not signed in to Google, but using a browser mode
which persists cookies (ie, not incognito mode). The actual control is
[https://www.google.com/history/optout](https://www.google.com/history/optout)

Here's the equivalent for YouTube signed-out watch and search history:
[https://www.youtube.com/feed/history](https://www.youtube.com/feed/history) .
Click "Clear All Watch History," then click "Pause Watch History," then choose
"Search history" and repeat those 2 steps again.

Do all of this from each device you use Google or YouTube from.

------
sorum
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...](https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1070027261376491520?s=21)

~~~
Bartweiss
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
incognito results. If this is correct, the tweet's claim that you can use
Incognito to see the impact of personalization for yourself is seriously
misleading.

\- The study attempted to control for localization by tokenizing all local
results, so that two result sets which each had a local story in the same spot
would be treated as identical.

\- The study attempted to control for rollout and testing effects by running
all searches at the same time and assuming that those forces would lead to
most users seeing similar results, with a few differing. Instead, they found
substantial variance across all users.

I can certainly come up with explanations for how each of these changes could
be non-personalized. Incognito variance could be a consequence of region and
device effects which are user-independent. Tests might be scaled up near
50/50, and rollouts may not hit all datacenters at once, invalidating the
"changes for a few users" assumption. And most significantly, DuckDuckGo's
localization control looks completely inadequate to me. It would completely
fail the given "football" example, and might fail for the given search terms:
'vaccine' produced highly-localized results they adjusted for, but 'gun
control' could produce pseudo-local results like a preference for national
stories with the user's state as a keyword, and that wouldn't have been
identified.

A better version of this study would presumably try to alter its variables
separately, for instance by using multiple devices in one location and one
device in multiple locations via VPN. As is, the controls seem seriously
lacking.

But I'm just making up reasons, and frankly they don't seem likely to explain
the sheer size of the differences. When I run those searches, I don't get
"football" and "Paris" level customization, I get a bunch of national-scope
results that have no obvious reason to vary between incognito users. I wish
the tweets here had touched on _any_ of that. As is, they explain general
search mechanics while frustratingly bypassing the most significant claims.

~~~
saalweachter
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.

~~~
Bartweiss
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.

------
skybrian
It sounds like they found a lot of variation but not that the differences are
biased in any particular direction? Could this be random?

The use of "filter bubble" doesn't seem justified if it looks like random
variation.

------
laxd
Beeing hooked on rust the programming language and rust the game at the same
time has been interesting google-wise. I used to take it granted to get rust
programming results. And now google seems really confused. And I'm not getting
good results for either. "Personalized search matters". And also. Fuck privacy
invasion.

------
xiii1408
I've observed this a lot when working on SEO for my webpage. I'll be like,
"Cool, I'm the top result for my name!" And, yes, this will be true for people
searching from Berkeley, where I live. But if I go to an IP address over in
SF, I'm not even on the front page.

------
r_singh
This is honestly the worst thing ever, I've started noticing this too while
testing SEO for different projects.

What if google becomes like Netflix? Only shows you results you expect,
honestly a progression towards that has already rendered google search quite
useless for most of my searching. I prefer searching HN on Algolia, Reddit,
Medium and other websites (not at the top of my head) to find unexpected
resources that I expect google "search engine" to give me.

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

~~~
wmeredith
They literally announced it on their blog in _2009_.

[https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/personalized-
search-...](https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/personalized-search-for-
everyone.html)

I'm a DDG fan, but they doth protest too much sometimes.

~~~
Bartweiss
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.

------
ssharp
I'm pretty certain, based on experience in my household, that Google's display
network, Facebook, and Amazon are all doing some sort of targeting outside of
cookies/pixels. My assumption is that it's based on your IP address.

------
jacamat
Localization != personalization.

~~~
xiphias2
I agree, they are completely orthogonal features. The only personalization
that's happening is inside the new session that the person creates when using
incognito mode, which is understandable.

------
rv-de
Maybe that explains why Google gave me 1st-page results about "shrooms" few
days ago while my search term was specifically asking for "Champignons" and
"pizza" and whether to pre-boil or use them raw.

------
mastazi
Youtube does that as well, and it has for a long time I guess, since I have
been consistently able to reproduce the following:

1\. open Youtube's home page in your main browser, while logged out and after
clearing cookies

2\. open the same page in a "virgin" browser (e.g. a newly created VM or even
just using an incognito window)

observe that 1 has some amount of "personalisation".

When I saw this the first time I was baffled, so I did some research and found
out that it's because of local storage. As per step 1, I was clearing just the
cookies but not local storage.

Lesson learned: don't just clear cookies, remember to clear local storage as
well

------
netcan
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) has to come from browser software or w3c. The browser
should control permissions, in broadly the same way mobile OSs/appstore
control permissions and _login state._

ATM Google de-anonymizes you. This should just be impossible, unless the
browser tells it who you are.

^I know gdpr is popular with a lot of people here. I think it has some good
parts, but I disagree with other parts. We can still be friends and disagree
:)

~~~
NeedMoreTea
_> 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".

~~~
wtfstatists
Safety/Quality regulations reduces choices and quantity. This hits poor the
most, as they can no longer buy inferior but cheap products and services. See
China.

Instead regulations should be focus on reducing scam and misleading offerings.
If someone wants to buy/use despite knowing the risks, let him.

~~~
NeedMoreTea
> Safety/Quality regulations reduces choices and quantity.

They also prevent people dying when they plug in their appliance, or dying
because there's lead paint on the product, or buying flour that's adulterated
with alum, plaster of Paris or chalk.

The history of food and electrical regulations, on both sides of the Atlantic,
are enough to convince me that rich and poor (I have been both) are better
served by enough regulation to ensure basic standards are met. In the case of
the US and food, prior to such regulation, adulteration was more common than
not[0].

> If someone wants to buy/use despite knowing the risks, let him.

This is _never_ the case. The risks are hidden, the product masquerades as a
genuine iPhone charger, or contains unsafe substances that cannot be known
without laboratory testing. Data is taken "to provide a better service",
without mention of the 206 places it's sold to, or other uses for which it is
mined, or the fun psychological experiments staff might run on their users.

To relate it back to the original discussion about data, I am fully in favour
of regulations that demand adequate safeguards and protections of personal
data, and high expectations of diligence from companies that must use such
data. It goes without saying that I am in favour of severe penalties for
egregious breach of such regulations.

[0] [https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-11-04/harvey-wiley-us-
chemi...](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-11-04/harvey-wiley-us-chemist-who-
fought-to-ban-poison-from-food/10427832)

------
known
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Profiling_(information_science...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Profiling_\(information_science\))

------
jammygit
My search results have been personalized for years without being logged in. I
didn't realize this was surprising.

~~~
51lver
It's a little more shocking when they can identify 3 different users on 1 pc
behind one ip in roughly 1 search.

Seriously, freaks me out. I search on youtube for airplanes on the computer tv
and suddenly a ton of music I like pops up. Kid searches for some kids show,
and many more pop up. Wife searches for reviews or some shitty trash tv shows,
and she get's all her interests recommended next. They _know_ us on one
computer on one ip without being logged in.

------
dzonga
study finds in 2018. I found out google was 'listening' when I got youtube
recommendations on my friends laptop in 2012, when I wasn't signed in, that I
get on mine. Btw our youtube habits are different. Given his playstation had
different recommendations.

------
jancsika
So if I search for the value of PI while visiting Indiana it could show "3?"

------
cartercole
we have known this and they state it publicly... who funded this?

------
rc_kas
Well .. they certainly do a shitty job at personalizing my results. These days
I can never find what I want on Google. I've resorted to using other search
tools (github search, reddit search, stack overflow search, ddg, etc)

~~~
godelski
I feel like this has happened everywhere. YouTube included.

------
whizzkid
Safari 12 is impressive when it comes to preventing browser fingerprinting and
cross-site tracking. I wish it was cross platform. Not sure though how much it
can do against Google.

------
thecleaner
New study ? You just have to open two different browsers and open use them for
a couple of days and its quite obvious. Question is whats the problem with
this ?

------
jeisc
my own private Idaho['google']

------
guix992
What's been a shame is that there is still no open source Search Engine
despite this being a "solved" problem. Like not even something like there is a
docker image that you throw at your cluster that gets you faster and faster
search results. That's the real shame.

We should've commidified the core of search engine by now with programmatic
and API access as commonplace and yet here we are where search engine software
is still dominated by proprietary services.

~~~
Gaelan
I’m guessing that it’s impractical to self-host something big enough to be
useful.

~~~
cabaalis
I am sure this already exists even as I type it, but this sounds like a great
job for a distributed system running a federated search protocol.

~~~
guix992
The hard part is already solved, you don't even have to crawl the web to build
the index. There is already a periodically refreshed index of the web that you
can download: commoncrawl.org

Now someone just needs to configure, Apache Lucene as a proper docker image
that can consume this index.

------
btgis
Even if I use an addon that deletes my cookies from Google every time I close
the tab?

~~~
stupidbird
Do you switch IPs, browsers, computers, etc every time you close the tab too?
If not, Google tracks you.

~~~
giancarlostoro
Even if you did all that Google will track you. Whether they match up all your
identities or not is another story.

~~~
51lver
Bring a laptop from your home back to your folks place and I bet they can make
the connection...

~~~
stupidbird
No doubt whatsoever. A lot of those "Facebook is listening to my conversation"
claims come from the fact that they'll associate people based on network
locations, IPs, etc.

For example: You're at your friends house with the Facebook app, your friend
clicks on an ad for socks. The next day you start seeing ads for socks despite
not having any sock-related activity. This is just an oversimplified example.

------
annadane
This would all be fine if it were opt-in but all these companies who insist on
excessive reliance on algorithms just end up making their service worse.

------
ssalka
Strange as it is, I was just researching whether it was possible to search
Google truly anonymously - stumbled upon a Firefox add-on called Searchonymous
[0]. Planning on trying it out today.

If all else fails, can always use another search engine ;)

[0] [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/addon/searchonymous...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/addon/searchonymous/)

------
zepto
Is anybody the least bit surprised? It’s been obvious forever that google has
absolutely zero respect for privacy.

Yes, this can be rationalized as ‘improving search results’, and indeed the
results may be better.

But, it’s also building a personal profile without consent, or indeed with
implied lack of consent.

If google cared about privacy, they would simply offer people the option not
to be tracked, and respect it.

They don’t.

