5 ms·

Do people actually use Google Search while being logged-in in Google?

by akerro 10y ago

rbinv 10y ago
Umm, yes?
hellofunk 10y ago
Of course. Most people aren't going to logout of Gmail when they want to do a Google search.
roel_v 10y ago
Who ever logs out?
- Twisell 10y ago
  Me since I rarely log in in the first place. I only googlog in to my association's "shared account" and log out straight away. Also I mainly use DuckDuckGo and bang !g only when needed. Privacy actually matter to me...
  - chillingeffect 10y ago
    DDG is great! I've been using it for almost six months straight now! I'm glad we're not contributing to the monoculture! Keep it up!
- akerro 10y ago
  Why do you even login?
  - tokenizerrr 10y ago
    Gmail? Google Apps for Business? Youtube? Google Analytics?
    - lucb1e 10y ago
      For YouTube you don't need to log in; the rest I don't use.
      - tripzilch 10y ago
        And YouTube is actually better when you're not logged in, because ironically the suggestions are better. Logged out you get to see the sidebar with videos related to the current video you're watching (which makes sense), logged in you get a sidebar filled with "suggestions" of shit that have nothing to do with what you're looking at, instead some vague mix of topics you watched last week. It can even become rather offensive, IMHO. I don't always watch videos because I agree with the uploader or audience. I can watch a racist dude rant because it fascinates me, to laugh at them, or because I wanted a reminder that such people actually exist. When the (not logged-in) sidebar with related videos then is filled with more racist trash, I'm like "fine, makes sense. related videos. okay. not clicking, but there they are". Another time I had been watching videos on my Android phone (afaik the YouTube app doesn't let you be not logged-in) on a subject related to feminism. I don't use the app that often and I can't recall what the clips had been about (but probably nothing very umm "high brow"). So, the next week I open the YouTube app, find a whole bunch of "suggested" videos about apparently people calling radio shows and "guy tells those feminists what's what!" or "this guy's reaction puts feminist in place!" trash. If it had been "related" to a video I had just watched, I'd be like "fine, makes sense". But in this case, whatever I did was a week ago and apparently made Google believe these are my interests. Notice how that's a bit more personal? "related to current video" versus "related to this guy's interests". So I'm really offended and think "fuck you and mind your own business". If your algorithm is that stupid, maybe you just shouldn't use it and don't even for a moment pretend that your prejudiced joke of a "profile" is of me and I don't want to be associated with it. Ugh.
- lucb1e 10y ago
  I don't, but frankly Google isn't in my cookie whitelist so their cookies never get stored beyond using a Google service (like YouTube or, uh, I actually don't think I use another Google service).
grkvlt 10y ago
Absolutely! The saved search history is incredibly useful for shaping and filtering search results to make them more targeted and helpful. I also see more relevant adverts, and less generic ones, which makes them much less annoying. People of a certain technical mindset have a knee-jerk "Privacy! Surveillance! Evil!" response, tuned to the worst possible world type of scenario, where the rest of the Internet is populated entirely by malicious bad actors, seeking to harm users. The reality is much more nuanced: most of the rest of the Internet neither knows nor cares about you; the majority of the rest are trying to provide useful services to improve their users lives, sometimes trying to make money by doing this; a minority are bad, either trying to steal from or scam you. In terms of Google search, the fact it retains context is actually useful most of the time, and the edge cases where it is harmful are easily avoided by countermeasures like logging out, using DuckDuckGo, installing Tor or switching to incognito mode.
- hartpuff 10y ago
  > the majority of the rest are trying to provide useful services to improve their users lives And if the ads or results on subjects you're interested in just happen to take a line against what you personally believe on the subject, and instead happen to tout an agenda that benefits the (right-wing/capitalist/US-centric) corporate or political interests of Google and FB and the like, is it still just about improving your life?
- chillingeffect 10y ago
  > tuned to the worst possible world type of scenario, With the possibility of a racist American president looming, search results which could signal one's ethnicity become a valid concern.
- tripzilch 10y ago
  > The saved search history is incredibly useful for shaping and filtering search results to make them more targeted and helpful. Google gets my approx location from my IP whether I like it or not, which is really all the targeted results I need. What else is there? There is so little remaining of the actual web search engine that Google used to be 10-15 years ago, I only ever use it for the typical "local" queries that indeed benefit from knowing what city I'm in. All the other stuff I need to find on the web, if I were to trust Google it might as well not exist. It used to be that any keyword-combination you could imagine that would (reasonably) appear on some website somewhere, would get you that website, some others and a bunch of spam. Google was good at sorting the spam downwards, but if you wanted, you could browse it (then about 10 years ago they limited this to max 1000 results even if they reported millions). Today, you get nothing. You get a bunch of results that vaguely match the topic of your keywords. Your search keywords that happen to appear are bolded, but that's just a visual effect now, suggesting they tried looking for all your keywords and this was just the best they could find. Except bullshit because I remember the old web, it was smaller, but it was still incomprehensibly gigantic, and already everything was there, and Google could find it under half a second, with their old tech. (where did all the web go?) So let's be honest, they're not really looking. It's like an annoying salesman, you enter a shop, ask for a specific thing (which they may or may not have), and the salesman tries to convince you that the thing they want to sell you is the thing you were really looking for. This is what your "targeted" "suggestions" are doing to you. They're targeted to suggest you that you want that something which they want to show you. Which is, admittedly, all sorts of useful for "local" searches, which is truly the only thing I use Google "web" search for nowadays. Otherwise it's DuckDuckGo which can send me straight to the websearch that has my answer (discogs, wikipedia, various image search engines..). It's not as good as Google used to be (although back then I had my own tools for the meta searches), but it's also not worse than what Google is now. oh and I didn't even touch on the part where you said that better targeted relevant ads are less annoying. The idea that ads can be "relevant" comes from the ad networks, but there's no such thing. If it was relevant it'd be a search result. If it requires payment to appear between your results, then either it is less relevant than its paid position would suggest (at the cost of another, by definition more relevant, result), or it actually is relevant and the fact that you seen it only because it was paid for means the engine is not actually doing every simple thing to show you the most relevant results, but actively hiding some. Sure this is a business model, what gets me about it is that Google one day used to be so much better than this and used that credit to build something trashy like this. If they were a new search engine nobody would give it a second look.

Do people actually use Google Search while being logged-in in Google?

by akerro 10y ago

Do people actually use Google Search while being logged-in in Google?

rbinv 10y ago

Umm, yes?

hellofunk 10y ago

Of course. Most people aren't going to logout of Gmail when they want to do a Google search.

roel_v 10y ago

Who ever logs out?

Twisell 10y ago
Me since I rarely log in in the first place. I only googlog in to my association's "shared account" and log out straight away. Also I mainly use DuckDuckGo and bang !g only when needed. Privacy actually matter to me...
- chillingeffect 10y ago
  DDG is great! I've been using it for almost six months straight now! I'm glad we're not contributing to the monoculture! Keep it up!
akerro 10y ago
Why do you even login?
- tokenizerrr 10y ago
  Gmail? Google Apps for Business? Youtube? Google Analytics?
  - lucb1e 10y ago
    For YouTube you don't need to log in; the rest I don't use.
    - tripzilch 10y ago
      And YouTube is actually better when you're not logged in, because ironically the suggestions are better. Logged out you get to see the sidebar with videos related to the current video you're watching (which makes sense), logged in you get a sidebar filled with "suggestions" of shit that have nothing to do with what you're looking at, instead some vague mix of topics you watched last week. It can even become rather offensive, IMHO. I don't always watch videos because I agree with the uploader or audience. I can watch a racist dude rant because it fascinates me, to laugh at them, or because I wanted a reminder that such people actually exist. When the (not logged-in) sidebar with related videos then is filled with more racist trash, I'm like "fine, makes sense. related videos. okay. not clicking, but there they are". Another time I had been watching videos on my Android phone (afaik the YouTube app doesn't let you be not logged-in) on a subject related to feminism. I don't use the app that often and I can't recall what the clips had been about (but probably nothing very umm "high brow"). So, the next week I open the YouTube app, find a whole bunch of "suggested" videos about apparently people calling radio shows and "guy tells those feminists what's what!" or "this guy's reaction puts feminist in place!" trash. If it had been "related" to a video I had just watched, I'd be like "fine, makes sense". But in this case, whatever I did was a week ago and apparently made Google believe these are my interests. Notice how that's a bit more personal? "related to current video" versus "related to this guy's interests". So I'm really offended and think "fuck you and mind your own business". If your algorithm is that stupid, maybe you just shouldn't use it and don't even for a moment pretend that your prejudiced joke of a "profile" is of me and I don't want to be associated with it. Ugh.
lucb1e 10y ago
I don't, but frankly Google isn't in my cookie whitelist so their cookies never get stored beyond using a Google service (like YouTube or, uh, I actually don't think I use another Google service).

grkvlt 10y ago

Absolutely! The saved search history is incredibly useful for shaping and filtering search results to make them more targeted and helpful. I also see more relevant adverts, and less generic ones, which makes them much less annoying. People of a certain technical mindset have a knee-jerk "Privacy! Surveillance! Evil!" response, tuned to the worst possible world type of scenario, where the rest of the Internet is populated entirely by malicious bad actors, seeking to harm users. The reality is much more nuanced: most of the rest of the Internet neither knows nor cares about you; the majority of the rest are trying to provide useful services to improve their users lives, sometimes trying to make money by doing this; a minority are bad, either trying to steal from or scam you. In terms of Google search, the fact it retains context is actually useful most of the time, and the edge cases where it is harmful are easily avoided by countermeasures like logging out, using DuckDuckGo, installing Tor or switching to incognito mode.

hartpuff 10y ago
> the majority of the rest are trying to provide useful services to improve their users lives And if the ads or results on subjects you're interested in just happen to take a line against what you personally believe on the subject, and instead happen to tout an agenda that benefits the (right-wing/capitalist/US-centric) corporate or political interests of Google and FB and the like, is it still just about improving your life?
chillingeffect 10y ago
> tuned to the worst possible world type of scenario, With the possibility of a racist American president looming, search results which could signal one's ethnicity become a valid concern.
tripzilch 10y ago
> The saved search history is incredibly useful for shaping and filtering search results to make them more targeted and helpful. Google gets my approx location from my IP whether I like it or not, which is really all the targeted results I need. What else is there? There is so little remaining of the actual web search engine that Google used to be 10-15 years ago, I only ever use it for the typical "local" queries that indeed benefit from knowing what city I'm in. All the other stuff I need to find on the web, if I were to trust Google it might as well not exist. It used to be that any keyword-combination you could imagine that would (reasonably) appear on some website somewhere, would get you that website, some others and a bunch of spam. Google was good at sorting the spam downwards, but if you wanted, you could browse it (then about 10 years ago they limited this to max 1000 results even if they reported millions). Today, you get nothing. You get a bunch of results that vaguely match the topic of your keywords. Your search keywords that happen to appear are bolded, but that's just a visual effect now, suggesting they tried looking for all your keywords and this was just the best they could find. Except bullshit because I remember the old web, it was smaller, but it was still incomprehensibly gigantic, and already everything was there, and Google could find it under half a second, with their old tech. (where did all the web go?) So let's be honest, they're not really looking. It's like an annoying salesman, you enter a shop, ask for a specific thing (which they may or may not have), and the salesman tries to convince you that the thing they want to sell you is the thing you were really looking for. This is what your "targeted" "suggestions" are doing to you. They're targeted to suggest you that you want that something which they want to show you. Which is, admittedly, all sorts of useful for "local" searches, which is truly the only thing I use Google "web" search for nowadays. Otherwise it's DuckDuckGo which can send me straight to the websearch that has my answer (discogs, wikipedia, various image search engines..). It's not as good as Google used to be (although back then I had my own tools for the meta searches), but it's also not worse than what Google is now. oh and I didn't even touch on the part where you said that better targeted relevant ads are less annoying. The idea that ads can be "relevant" comes from the ad networks, but there's no such thing. If it was relevant it'd be a search result. If it requires payment to appear between your results, then either it is less relevant than its paid position would suggest (at the cost of another, by definition more relevant, result), or it actually is relevant and the fact that you seen it only because it was paid for means the engine is not actually doing every simple thing to show you the most relevant results, but actively hiding some. Sure this is a business model, what gets me about it is that Google one day used to be so much better than this and used that credit to build something trashy like this. If they were a new search engine nobody would give it a second look.