
Google Now Personalizes Everyone’s Search Results (Even Logged Out) - pierrefar
http://searchengineland.com/google-now-personalizes-everyones-search-results-31195
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barrkel
Google's core service, the simple page <http://www.google.com/> , has been
getting more and more borked and broken over the past year, and especially
over the past few days.

As it is, Google has been rewriting search result links so that they redirect
through Google before forwarding to the final destination. It causes a
noticeable delay, never mind the privacy implications. I've disabled this
through a Greasemonkey script called googlePrivacy.

Now (as of today, on Firefox), they have fiddled with their home page, so that
it gradually "fades in" when you mouse over it. Unfortunately, the
googlePrivacy script interacts poorly with this, effectively disabling the
fading in - leaving you with a very bare Google home page.

Also new behaviour, google.com keeps redirecting to google.co.uk, so much so
that I've had to change my Google shortcut to <http://www.google.com/ncr>
_and_ install a Google US country-specific search provider, since Google's new
behaviour essentially broke Firefox's built-in Google search provider. They
also lost my search settings (in particular, I prefer 100 results per page).

Some, or many, of my problems may be caused by poor interaction with
googlePrivacy, but the old ways worked, goddammit, and I am irked that I am
unilaterally being frog-marched to a new version of client-side Google that I
never asked for and don't want.

~~~
gradschool
One shouldn't fault Google for capitalizing on most people's low regard for
their own privacy when the opportunity exists. If it's giving you grief, why
don't you use a search engine with a better privacy policy?

<http://clusty.com/privacy>

~~~
drunkpotato
_One shouldn't fault Google..._

Why not?

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teeja
I need 'personalized' search results like I need a hole in the head. I use
search a _lot_ and _I_ personalize it by using the search skills I've
acquired. I don't need some unknown algorithm making unsubtle decisions.
Making this opt-out is a PITA ... but it's their sandbox ...

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labria
[http://www.theonion.com/content/video/google_opt_out_feature...](http://www.theonion.com/content/video/google_opt_out_feature_lets_users)
this will soon be a bit too real =)

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yason
It seems I had had the history enabled, at least partially.

I looked at my history and it's pretty fucking scary. Even for myself. And I
don't mean porn sites or anything, it's just that pretty much anything I had
thought in the last few days was there, nicely listed and visible should I
choose to return to those thoughts.

I cleared the whole history and Google said it also made the history paused
for me until I manually resume it. I'm glad it offered that option by default.

But I still suspect they're there somewhere.

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foulmouthboy
I don't understand why this is so bad. Google's trying to make sure you get
more relevant results. If you already know what you want to find, you don't
need a search engine.

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budman
If you don't like it, like me, it is simple; use an anonymous proxy. Or use
google scraper: <http://www.scroogle.org/>

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euroclydon
The kitty is sort of out of the bag with the original page rank algorithm,
right? I mean wasn't it partially funded by the government. I don't see why a
free and open sourced search engine can't emerge to compete with Google on
pure search. Now that they are a public corporation, there will be a
relentless drive toward growth, to the detriment of most of their casual
customers.

~~~
dmoney
Here's an idea for an open source search engine: If you could make the search
index small enough, only the crawler would have to be hosted. The actual
search engine would run on each user's machine and download the diffs to the
index regularly, and big brother would never see your queries.

This might be a pipe dream, as modern search indexes are probably much larger
than the plaintext of the whole of the web. Maybe it could be divided by
subject.. I guess that would have the same privacy problem: the server would
see which subjects you were requesting. Maybe you could download the whole
thing and only decompress locally the subjects and languages you wanted.

