Asklemmy

44147 readers

1190 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
[email protected]: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

501

Using Google whilst Duck Duck Go is down. How long has Google been this bad? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 7 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

161 comments fedilink hide all child comments

So ddg is down, so I visit Google. It's been some years.

I just can't believe how poor it's results are, and how it's trying to suggest things it think I might also want (and failing miserably).

I just assumed ddg would be the lesser, but I use it for privacy. Turns out I'm wrong.

How long has Google been this bad?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] planish 26 points 7 months ago

Do they "give high rankings" to CloudFlare sites because they just boost up whoever is behind CloudFlare, or because the sites happen to be good search hits, maybe that load quickly, and they don't go in and penalize them for... telling CloudFlare that you would like them to send you the page when you go to the site?

Counting the number of times results for different links are clicked is expected search engine behavior. Recording what search strings are sent from results pages for what other search strings is also probably fine, and because of the way forms and referrers work (the URL of the page you searched from has the old query in it) the page's query will be sent in the referrer by all browsers by default even if the site neither wanted it nor intends to record it. Recording what text is highlighted is weird, but probably not a genuine threat.

The remote favicon fetch design in their browser app was fixed like 4 years ago.

The "accusation" of "fingerprinting" was along the lines of "their site called a canvas function oh no". It's not "fingerprinting" every time someone tries to use a canvas tag.

What exactly is "all data available in my session" when I click on an ad? Is it basically the stuff a site I go to can see anyway? Sounds like it's nothing exciting or some exciting pieces of data would be listed.

This analysis misses the important point that none of this stuff is getting cross-linked to user identities or profiles. The problem with Google isn't that they examine how their search results pages are interacted with in general or that they count Linux users, it's that they keep a log of what everyone individually is searching, specifically. Not doing that sounds "anonymous" to me, even if it isn't Tor-strength anonymity that's resistant to wiretaps.

There's an important difference between "we're trying to not do surveillance capitalism but as a centralized service data still comes to our servers to actually do the service, and we don't boycott all of CloudFlare, AWS, Microsoft, Verizon, and Yahoo", as opposed to "we're building shadow profiles of everyone for us and our 1,437 partners". And I feel like you shouldn't take privacy advice from someone who hosts it unencrypted.