This feature is powered by another project we run, where we measure the tracking landscape in the web (most popular domains): https://whotracks.me. Details on how that works can be found in our paper [0]. Also - we are flirting with the idea of providing a mode where the ranking is informed by the trackers in the destination site. Would love to hear your thoughts on whether you'd like smth like this.
> 2) Page previews (I'm not sure about whether I like that)
At the moment it's only a placeholder for a lengthier title and description (if available), but we are planning to use the space for rendering a short summary of the content/media in that site + similar sites in terms of content (query-relevant of course). This is more work in progress as we want to make sure content creators are on board. Again: would love to hear your thoughts on that.
> we are flirting with the idea of providing a mode where the ranking is informed by the trackers in the destination site. Would love to hear your thoughts on whether you'd like smth like this.
That's definitely the right way to go. I would also very much appreciate an option not to show in the result list sites/pages having any trackers.
I noticed that even Wikipedia is reported as having some trackers. But when I looked closer I noticed that most of those belong to the Wikimedia foundation, which is fine. I mean, I don't mind site owners tracking what I do on their site, I just don't want to be followed across the whole Web.
The rest of the Wikipedia trackers are supposed to be Google fonts and statics, but I couldn't witness any calls to those. Maybe the stats are not quite up to date?
If such a score is to be given, it better be fair and reflecting the current state of affairs.
Hi, I work at Cliqz on our Anti-tracking system, and the WhoTracks.Me data that powers these stats on the search page.
These stats are updated monthly, and based on millions of loads of each site. The WhoTracks.Me page for wikipedia.org (https://whotracks.me/websites/wikipedia.org.html) shows that the Google Fonts and Google Static trackers occur very infrequently (<2% of pages), so may be on some part of the site that you did not visit.
While the Wikimedia tracker may seem innocuous, they do set a cookie that is sent in third-party contexts, and have presence across several sites beyond Wikipedia (133 of the top 10k) (https://whotracks.me/trackers/wikimedia.org.html). Theoretically, they could track user sessions across these sites. In reality this is likely an oversight in the server configuration, but objectively this profile looks no different to that of a legitimate tracker.
This feature is powered by another project we run, where we measure the tracking landscape in the web (most popular domains): https://whotracks.me. Details on how that works can be found in our paper [0]. Also - we are flirting with the idea of providing a mode where the ranking is informed by the trackers in the destination site. Would love to hear your thoughts on whether you'd like smth like this.
> 2) Page previews (I'm not sure about whether I like that)
At the moment it's only a placeholder for a lengthier title and description (if available), but we are planning to use the space for rendering a short summary of the content/media in that site + similar sites in terms of content (query-relevant of course). This is more work in progress as we want to make sure content creators are on board. Again: would love to hear your thoughts on that.
Disclaimer: I work at Cliqz.
[0] WhoTracks .Me: Shedding light on the opaque world of online tracking - https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.08959