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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 relev

by 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.

by grkvlt 10y ago

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.