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I did not realize google recorded which links you clicked. Edit: I knew they recorded it. I did not know they associated it with your profile.

adam12 10y ago
?? How did you not know this? That is basically the backbone of their business.
Jemmeh 10y ago
That seems like quite a natural thing to collect to improve their search algorithm at the very least. "Are people finding what they're looking for?" basically.
- dredmorbius 10y ago
  It's not necessary to run trackers on everyone, all the time. Sampling works. Randomly selecting accounts for inclusion and immediately dissociating that account identity from the data would provide substantively useful data. Much the same way as it is possible, on the basis of 100 - 300 randomly selected G+ profiles to gain a strong sense of what the level of public activity of all 2.2 billion profiles (in use as of early 2015) was. Sure, you can increase accuracy, somewhat, by bumping up that sampling count to 50,000 profiles. As I did. Though that (and monte-carlo resampling of subsets of the profiles) substantiated the trends which were clear from the first 100 or so results. Or you can bump up the value to 500,000, as Stone Temple Consulting did. Which again, largely re-substantiated the results I'd found. Google receives something on the order of one billion searches per day. Sampling a very small percentage of those would provide very accurate results, at far smaller processing cost, and moreover, at far smaller data disclosure risk. Data are liability. Even if the concern were, say, edge cases regarding specific terms and the like, that would be possible to explore with targeted random sampling (stratified random samples). All very-well-established statistical techniques. https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/naya9wqdemiovuvwvoyquq https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/naya9wqdemiovuvwvoyquq
  - Jemmeh 10y ago
    Well just making sure people are finding what they want is only part of it. Since so much of their revenue is from ads, the better their targeting, the more money they make. If they have all this data on a person, they can target on a per person basis. And that money is probably talking louder than any care about liability from data based on how much they're collecting. They're a business, they have to have revenue in some way. I'm making some assumptions, please correct me if I'm wrong.
sp332 10y ago
Go to any Google results page, right-click a result and copy the URL. Paste it and see what's really in there. It's not the actual link you wanted, instead it's a link to a Google server with lots of metadata about your search that redirects you to the link you wanted after recording everything about your search.
tonylemesmer 10y ago
if you use Firefox there is an addon called Google Redirects Fixer [1] [1] https://matagus.github.io/remove-google-redirects-addon/ https://matagus.github.io/remove-google-redirects-addon/
WayneBro 10y ago
They haven't been tracking which links I click for the past five years or so since I've been running an extension like "Don't track me Google" - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/dont-track-me-google/gdbofhhdmcladcmmfjolgndfkpobecpg?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/dont-track-me-goog... The reason I started running that extension is because I i was sick of waiting for google.com to redirect me.

adam12 10y ago

?? How did you not know this? That is basically the backbone of their business.

Jemmeh 10y ago

That seems like quite a natural thing to collect to improve their search algorithm at the very least. "Are people finding what they're looking for?" basically.

dredmorbius 10y ago
It's not necessary to run trackers on everyone, all the time. Sampling works. Randomly selecting accounts for inclusion and immediately dissociating that account identity from the data would provide substantively useful data. Much the same way as it is possible, on the basis of 100 - 300 randomly selected G+ profiles to gain a strong sense of what the level of public activity of all 2.2 billion profiles (in use as of early 2015) was. Sure, you can increase accuracy, somewhat, by bumping up that sampling count to 50,000 profiles. As I did. Though that (and monte-carlo resampling of subsets of the profiles) substantiated the trends which were clear from the first 100 or so results. Or you can bump up the value to 500,000, as Stone Temple Consulting did. Which again, largely re-substantiated the results I'd found. Google receives something on the order of one billion searches per day. Sampling a very small percentage of those would provide very accurate results, at far smaller processing cost, and moreover, at far smaller data disclosure risk. Data are liability. Even if the concern were, say, edge cases regarding specific terms and the like, that would be possible to explore with targeted random sampling (stratified random samples). All very-well-established statistical techniques. https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/naya9wqdemiovuvwvoyquq https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/naya9wqdemiovuvwvoyquq
- Jemmeh 10y ago
  Well just making sure people are finding what they want is only part of it. Since so much of their revenue is from ads, the better their targeting, the more money they make. If they have all this data on a person, they can target on a per person basis. And that money is probably talking louder than any care about liability from data based on how much they're collecting. They're a business, they have to have revenue in some way. I'm making some assumptions, please correct me if I'm wrong.

sp332 10y ago

Go to any Google results page, right-click a result and copy the URL. Paste it and see what's really in there. It's not the actual link you wanted, instead it's a link to a Google server with lots of metadata about your search that redirects you to the link you wanted after recording everything about your search.

tonylemesmer 10y ago

if you use Firefox there is an addon called Google Redirects Fixer [1] [1] https://matagus.github.io/remove-google-redirects-addon/ https://matagus.github.io/remove-google-redirects-addon/

WayneBro 10y ago

They haven't been tracking which links I click for the past five years or so since I've been running an extension like "Don't track me Google" - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/dont-track-me-google/gdbofhhdmcladcmmfjolgndfkpobecpg?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/dont-track-me-goog... The reason I started running that extension is because I i was sick of waiting for google.com to redirect me.