

Google scraping local webpages viewed in Chrome? - jwoah12

I've been developing a Javascript table component[1] for a little while, and a few weeks ago I was working on a demo page to show some examples. I picked a few stocks off the top of my head (AAPL, MSFT, GOOG, FB, JPM, C, VZ), and created a page that included a table with dummy data that changed every few seconds. The page is now viewable at http://jwoah12.github.io/aTable/demo.html#dynamicDataWorker, but at the time was only on my local machine. I was predominantly using Chrome to test the page. Later that day I happened to open up Google Now on my Galaxy Nexus, and noticed that there was a new card showing stock quotes.[2] Creepily, the stocks were all exactly the same as the ones I chose for my test page. I figure Chrome must have scraped the data and used it to show me the quotes in Google Now. Has anyone else seen behavior like this? I have to admit I don't like the idea of Google scraping local files I'm viewing.<p>[1] ATable - http://jwoah12.github.io/aTable<p>[2] http://jwoah12.github.io/aTable/gnow_stocks.jpg
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dragonwriter
A big point of Google Now is it scrapes what you view in browser and uses that
(web history) to determine what it should show you as cards.

I'm not sure why you'd expect local pages to be treated any differently in
terms of extracting signals to feed into the model of what is of interest to
you to be shown in Now.

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jwoah12
I don't know. Something about it just feels invasive. It probably doesn't help
that the Now card was not useful at all to me. I noticed that they scraped my
gmail for an OpenTable reservation confirmation a while back and notified me
when it was time to leave. That also felt creepy, but I didn't mind as much
because it was useful.

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yanw
They do not "scrape" content on your local machine. They do incorporate stuff
on their services including emails, as you mention (OpenTable, Amazon
packages, etc).

You can also have this sort of stuff triggerd by desktop searches if you join
this "field trial": <https://www.google.com/experimental/gmailfieldtrial/>

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yanw
If you've Googled these stocks/companies then they will show up on a Google
Now card. Chrome has nothing to do with it, except maybe that you are more
likely to be signed in when using Chrome.

