15 ms·

Google personalizes search results even when you’re logged out, new study finds

350 points by dcu 8y ago

Wowfunhappy 8y ago
I think this should be considered the original source instead? https://spreadprivacy.com/google-filter-bubble-study/ https://spreadprivacy.com/google-filter-bubble-study/
- nailer 8y ago
  So much Vox media blog spam on HN - yesterday their Tumblr story (wrapping Tumblr's official announcement and adding very little) hit front page, and the official announcement (posted earlier and modded up first) was marked as dupe.
maxehmookau 8y ago
Why is a study required to know this? Google, surely, should make this known in their privacy policy?
- wmeredith 8y ago
  They literally announced it on their blog in 2009. https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/personalized-search-for-everyone.html https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/personalized-search-... I'm a DDG fan, but they doth protest too much sometimes.
  - Bartweiss 8y ago
    That 2009 announcement makes several very specific promises which conflict with these results. It promised signed-out customization based on prior search history (which Google has confirmed Incognito doesn't use), with a notification and option to disable that customization. This result finds substantial variance with no notification and no toggle, which extends almost unchanged into Incognito. I think Occam's Razor says this is about localization and device type than fingerprinting, but it's definitely not just the thing they announced in 2009.
btgis 8y ago
Even if I use an addon that deletes my cookies from Google every time I close the tab?
- bilbo0s 8y ago
  Google has more than cookies deployed to get after you. There are a myriad number of tracking vectors they can use. (And to be fair, so can any of the other companies out there tracking everything.) Deleting cookies is certainly a start, but it's not sufficient to maintain privacy.
  - gruez 8y ago
    i know there's a bunch of ways to track people without cookies (supercookies, browser fingerprinting, etc.), but is there any evidence that they're being deployed by google or any of the big western advertising companies?
    - wgerard 8y ago
      I can say for certain that I worked for a company that wasn't Google and employed plenty of ways to track people that didn't involve cookies. We used it mostly to try and track malicious users (banned users, etc.) but it's still tracking nonetheless. It was reasonably effective. I'm sure a company of Google's size and sophistication has many more advanced methods than we did.
      - shaki-dora 8y ago
        Nobody is questioning their ability. It’s their willingness that’s relevant, and considering they are liable for a far more damaging PR nightmare than almost any other company, it’s not out of the question that they might not actually use every trick in their arsenal.
- stupidbird 8y ago
  Do you switch IPs, browsers, computers, etc every time you close the tab too? If not, Google tracks you.
zepto 8y ago
Is anybody the least bit surprised? It’s been obvious forever that google has absolutely zero respect for privacy. Yes, this can be rationalized as ‘improving search results’, and indeed the results may be better. But, it’s also building a personal profile without consent, or indeed with implied lack of consent. If google cared about privacy, they would simply offer people the option not to be tracked, and respect it. They don’t.
endymi0n 8y ago
I'm the last one to say you shouldn't scrutinize what Google does, but this is complete non-news. In the beginning, I was suspecting actively used logged-out cookies like Facebook infamously uses for example (try it, they're showing your face and keep tracking you all over the web). Reading on about differing search results in private mode, I was then expecting something like Google actually using IP + Fingerprint matching, which would be way more devious. In the end, this was purely about Google showing a different page to everyone. Playing the devil's advocate, this is about the only way to escape the exploration/exploitation dilemma. Is DuckDuckGo seriously complaining that Google is basically A/B testing everything, all the time? Because if that's the case, their data scientists should take some notes here.
- ravenstine 8y ago
  Maybe it's complete non-news to you. Facts aren't simply pointed out once and ubiquitously committed to the public consciousness. There's nothing wrong with a healthy reminder.
  - ucaetano 8y ago
    Well, this has been public for the past 9 years... https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/personalized-search-for-everyone.html https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/personalized-search-...
    - KevanM 8y ago
      God forbid somebody joined the internet or became aware of privacy issues in the past 9 years.
matt4077 8y ago
The study’s result seem to be that users often get unique results. That’s not the same as “personalized”, and it certainly isn’t evidence of “bias” as the spreadprivacy.org-link suggests. A good faith interpretation would point to google running learning algorithms on their results. That would also seem to be a far better explanation for Google changing parts of the page layout, such as the position of news and video results. The use of the term “bias” for describing differences search results also trips my conspiracy theory detectors.
anyzen 8y ago
Am I missing something? Google gives me the creeps as much as it does to any sane person, but if I understand correctly, DDG is comparing just the variation of results on each page. This doesn't mean that you're still in the (same) bubble when you log out. How about comparing the logged-in data with logged-out / private tab data? Did they find these two sets related? If not, G could be just implementing some sort of A/B testing on grand scale (learning from clicks and making search algorithm better).
skybrian 8y ago
It sounds like they found a lot of variation but not that the differences are biased in any particular direction? Could this be random? The use of "filter bubble" doesn't seem justified if it looks like random variation.
gowld 8y ago
I'm not sure I'm comfortable which a critique written by an economic competitor (DuckDuckGo) that obscures its identity and doesn't disclose its conflict of interest.
- s3r3nity 8y ago
  Well I mean what's wrong with the study itself? If you think DDG might have biased the structure or even falsified results, fine - make that claim. But otherwise this shouldn't really matter. Otherwise we're going to go down a rabbit hole of arguing on subjective matters, like why trust DDG, rather than pointing out objectively what's wrong with the research.
- hirundo 8y ago
  Well it does say that it's the DuckDuckGo Blog, and it has the DuckDuckGo logo at the top. That's not very obscure. https://spreadprivacy.com/google-filter-bubble-study/ https://spreadprivacy.com/google-filter-bubble-study/
- Ensorceled 8y ago
  How exactly is DuckDuckGo’s identity “obscured”? There’s the DDG duck up in the corner for heavens sake.
icebraining 8y ago
Welcome to 2009, I guess "Today we're helping people get better search results by extending Personalized Search to signed-out users worldwide (...)" https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/personalized-search-for-everyone.html https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/personalized-search-...
- wnevets 8y ago
  Sounds like the "study" should have been just a google search.
  - detaro 8y ago
    Because "they do X" makes looking into "what do the results of X look like" a completely pointless question?
    - icebraining 8y ago
      Yeah, the problem is more with the headline than the study.
- harshvladha 8y ago
  There's a difference between Signed out, and Incognito (no cookies)! + People generally tend to miss the point that Incognito doesn't prevent sharing the IP of the user. + I think DuckDuckGo's study missed out using VPN in their analysis. i.e., SignedIn vs Incognito vs (Incognito+VPN)
  - Kalium 8y ago
    > There's a difference between Signed out, and Incognito (no cookies)! Is there? I was under the impression that Incognito and its cousins generally still accept and preserve cookies for the duration of the temporary session. This means that for this purpose, there isn't really a difference.
    - 8y ago
Yetanfou 8y ago
I always assumed they would, just like Youtube 'recommends' videos for you whether you're logged in or not. This is one of the reasons why I don't use Google / Bing / etc directly anymore, instead I use them through a meta-search engine (using a local instance of Searx [1] with some extra code to have it search my local content as well [2]). [1] https://github.com/asciimoo/searx https://github.com/asciimoo/searx [2] https://github.com/asciimoo/searx/pull/1257 https://github.com/asciimoo/searx/pull/1257
thecleaner 8y ago
New study ? You just have to open two different browsers and open use them for a couple of days and its quite obvious. Question is whats the problem with this ?
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
annadane 8y ago
This would all be fine if it were opt-in but all these companies who insist on excessive reliance on algorithms just end up making their service worse.
jacamat 8y ago
Localization != personalization.
- xiphias2 8y ago
  I agree, they are completely orthogonal features. The only personalization that's happening is inside the new session that the person creates when using incognito mode, which is understandable.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
netcan 8y ago
To me, constantly complaining about sites/companies doing this stuff or wanting laws to make them stop... It just feels silly and pointless. In the long term, companies will gather and use what data they have access to. Companies will tailor their UI, product, etc. in order to keep that data flowing. A ruleset based on permission and consent is not practical, unless the goal is "better paperwork." The solution (imho) has to come from browser software or w3c. The browser should control permissions, in broadly the same way mobile OSs/appstore control permissions and login state. ATM Google de-anonymizes you. This should just be impossible, unless the browser tells it who you are. ^I know gdpr is popular with a lot of people here. I think it has some good parts, but I disagree with other parts. We can still be friends and disagree :)
- ucaetano 8y ago
  This isn't necessarily de-anonymizing, it is just taking your recent history into account. From 2009: For example, since I always search for [recipes] and often click on results from epicurious.com, Google might rank epicurious.com higher on the results page the next time I look for recipes. Other times, when I'm looking for news about Cornell University's sports teams, I search for [big red]. Because I frequently click on www.cornellbigred.com, Google might show me this result first, instead of the Big Red soda company or others. Previously, we only offered Personalized Search for signed-in users, and only when they had Web History enabled on their Google Accounts. What we're doing today is expanding Personalized Search so that we can provide it to signed-out users as well. This addition enables us to customize search results for you based upon 180 days of search activity linked to an anonymous cookie in your browser. It's completely separate from your Google Account and Web History (which are only available to signed-in users).
- craftyguy 8y ago
  > To me, constantly complaining about sites/companies doing this stuff or wanting laws to make them stop... It just feels silly and pointless. A significant percentage of HN content is posts about "facefriend does this with your data" or "google does that with your data." I suspect this might be why it feels especially silly and pointless, because currently the noise to signal ratio is quite high if you spend any time on HN. For the vast majority of the rest of the population, it's all noise and no signal. So here we are with one group that works "in the industry" that is largely desensitized to it, and another group that doesn't care, or know they should care.
nottorp 8y ago
The problem is, these "personalized results" have become mostly useless. For more technical (or simply specific) queries, Google seems to vomit useless only vaguely related links instead of, you know, pages that cover what i searched for. This does more to encourage me switching to some other search engine than any privacy concern.
- hinkley 8y ago
  For a lot of topics I just find myself with a lot of fake answer sites these days. About once a week I’ll get almost an entire page of results that way. Seems like dark SEO is winning.
  - basil-rash 8y ago
    I had actually forgotten about those until just now. I use Bing for most of my searching (I fall back to Google in the semi-rare cases where Bing doesn't work), and fake answer sites don't seem to be as prevalent on Bing. Maybe those sites tailor their SEO to Google's algorithms? Or maybe I've just grown numb to their presence.
    - nottorp 8y ago
      Fake answers are another problem, I'm talking about stuff like Google dropping a word from my query because it feels there aren't enough results that include it. Edit because I can't reply any more: As dsfyu404ed says below, it tends to drop the central term of the query, making the results 100% useless. Not that they're particularly useful even if it doesn't do that...
      - dsfyu404ed 8y ago
        > I'm talking about stuff like Google dropping a word from my query because it feels there aren't enough results that include it. It's particularly infuriating when it drops the location word from a search query for info on law and regulation. I don't care if broad form automotive insurance is available in some non-specific state, I care about if it's available in the state that I put in the query. Edit: Why is this downvoted?
ssalka 8y ago
Strange as it is, I was just researching whether it was possible to search Google truly anonymously - stumbled upon a Firefox add-on called Searchonymous [0]. Planning on trying it out today. If all else fails, can always use another search engine ;) [0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/searchonymous/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/searchonymous...
whizzkid 8y ago
Safari 12 is impressive when it comes to preventing browser fingerprinting and cross-site tracking. I wish it was cross platform. Not sure though how much it can do against Google.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
rdtsc 8y ago
I remember Paul Graham gave a keynote at one of the Pycons some years ago. It was about interesting ideas that you might want to work on in the future. One idea was to build a search engine that returns unpersonalized results. He talked about how Google will be moving into a "it's true, if it's true for you" kind of world. His idea was that it will open new opportunities. I think DuckDuckGo is one example, and they've grown and are doing pretty well. I think a lot of it comes as a reaction to Google, Facebook and other such things. "It's true, if it's true for you" is also a great phrase worth remembering. It describes so much about the current world and where things are headed, and why some things seemed to have gone off rails.
- ur-whale 8y ago
  While I have switched to DuckDuckGo a long time ago, there basically is no proof they're actually not doing exactly what Google does.
  - anon4242 8y ago
    The funny thing is that what DuckDuckGo is doing is actually working... By limiting ads to the search words they manage to provide relevant ads (insofar any ads are ever relevant). It turns out that when I search for "office chair" I'm actually not shopping for the Macbook Pro I was looking at a month ago... :O
  - Wowfunhappy 8y ago
    You're asking for proof of a negative. DuckDuckGo just put out a post criticizing Google for personalizing search results. They're a small company without many resources, and privacy has been their primary selling point from the get-go. Yes, DuckDuckGo could also be personalizing their own results, but if they were and people found out, there's risk of a significant outcry. Until I see evidence to the contrary, I'm inclined to assume good faith. See also: discussions around "but how do we know for sure that Apple has better data privacy than Google?"
    - dna_polymerase 8y ago
rc_kas 8y ago
Well .. they certainly do a shitty job at personalizing my results. These days I can never find what I want on Google. I've resorted to using other search tools (github search, reddit search, stack overflow search, ddg, etc)
- godelski 8y ago
  I feel like this has happened everywhere. YouTube included.
- mitchellford 8y ago
  Same experience. Oh well. All good things come to an end. I wonder what happened?
xiii1408 8y ago
I've observed this a lot when working on SEO for my webpage. I'll be like, "Cool, I'm the top result for my name!" And, yes, this will be true for people searching from Berkeley, where I live. But if I go to an IP address over in SF, I'm not even on the front page.
jammygit 8y ago
My search results have been personalized for years without being logged in. I didn't realize this was surprising.
- 51lver 8y ago
  It's a little more shocking when they can identify 3 different users on 1 pc behind one ip in roughly 1 search. Seriously, freaks me out. I search on youtube for airplanes on the computer tv and suddenly a ton of music I like pops up. Kid searches for some kids show, and many more pop up. Wife searches for reviews or some shitty trash tv shows, and she get's all her interests recommended next. They know us on one computer on one ip without being logged in.
ggggtez 8y ago
I think I agree with the complaints about this study. Unique doesn't mean personalized. IP geo-location, ISP... Don't forget browser and OS versions... there are lots of things you can sample over without actually representing any info leak from your logged in session. Someone searching "at the same time" could technically be different times (remember time zones!) for the purposes of the algorithm (is the search during "work hours" or not, etc). Users checking results on mobile phones compared to desktops... Without more details of how they controlled for these factors, the conclusion doesn't really follow. Edit: I think to really measure the conclusion, they'd need 87 people in the SAME geo location, perhaps on fresh out of the box devices. That would be the best way to create the "placebo" group for their test, which they don't seem to have done.
- tr33house 8y ago
  containers
ssharp 8y ago
I'm pretty certain, based on experience in my household, that Google's display network, Facebook, and Amazon are all doing some sort of targeting outside of cookies/pixels. My assumption is that it's based on your IP address.
cartercole 8y ago
we have known this and they state it publicly... who funded this?
sorum 8y ago
Here’s Google’s search liaison clarifying things 2 hours ago on Twitter. Localization shouldn’t be confused with personalization. Disclaimer: I work at Google, but not in search https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1070027261376491520?s=21 https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1070027261376491520...
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  I can buy the "eventual consistency" argument, and maaaybe even the desktop/mobile argument, but location and language are part of what people mean by "personalization" (even if not technically correct), and frankly, they're the most annoying part. I suppose that Google wants to optimize for people typing "football" in their search engine, at the expense of those trying to type "football results $countryname", or something more precise. But this seems ultra-annoying for anything more substantial than random trivia searches. As for language, well, years ago I set my default search engine in Chrome to explicit "https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%s" https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%s", because language optimization made 80+% of my searches return wrong answers. I admit I might be in a minority here, insofar as English-speaking people with work to do are a minority.
  - Bartweiss 8y ago
    > location and language are... the most annoying part This is a constant frustration - I fight with this feature every time I search for info about some place I'm not, for instance to plan travel. Searching with a country/state/zip alongside the query helps, but it's a kludge that's much worse than actual location-specificity, especially if one is going to an ambiguous place like Portland or Washington. I'd very much prefer it if Google offered the same sort of mechanics as weather sites: defaulting to my location, then offering a little box saying "search as if I'm located in:". Instead, the only option is "use precise location", which is no more helpful than basing location on my IP and history. In this sense, it's the same standard-uses-only paternalism that plagues Android. Maps on desktop has a great feature of "leave at" or "arrive by", which was removed from mobile in favor of a 'helpful' integration that can notify you about when to leave. It's terrible for anyone who wants to check a route for odd travel hours, or even do something as simple as decide when to set an alarm based on likely morning traffic. And so, of course, people have been requesting the more flexible option for years while consistently being told that the existing version is "more helpful". Increasingly, this stuff doesn't just bother me on a privacy or information-neutrality level. It's actively damaging, to the point where DuckDuckGo is actually more usable for certain types of search.
laxd 8y ago
Beeing hooked on rust the programming language and rust the game at the same time has been interesting google-wise. I used to take it granted to get rust programming results. And now google seems really confused. And I'm not getting good results for either. "Personalized search matters". And also. Fuck privacy invasion.
dzonga 8y ago
study finds in 2018. I found out google was 'listening' when I got youtube recommendations on my friends laptop in 2012, when I wasn't signed in, that I get on mine. Btw our youtube habits are different. Given his playstation had different recommendations.
guix992 8y ago
What's been a shame is that there is still no open source Search Engine despite this being a "solved" problem. Like not even something like there is a docker image that you throw at your cluster that gets you faster and faster search results. That's the real shame. We should've commidified the core of search engine by now with programmatic and API access as commonplace and yet here we are where search engine software is still dominated by proprietary services.
- Gaelan 8y ago
  I’m guessing that it’s impractical to self-host something big enough to be useful.
  - guix992 8y ago
    I don't believe that is a good enough limitation in this day and age of docker and kubernetes. You take the search engine docker image and keep scaling the number of nodes that are running it in the cluster till your search result time is fast enough for you.
  - cabaalis 8y ago
    I am sure this already exists even as I type it, but this sounds like a great job for a distributed system running a federated search protocol.
    - guix992 8y ago
      The hard part is already solved, you don't even have to crawl the web to build the index. There is already a periodically refreshed index of the web that you can download: commoncrawl.org Now someone just needs to configure, Apache Lucene as a proper docker image that can consume this index.
troydavis 8y ago
Here's where Google (barely) exposes an option called "Signed-out search activity" retention: https://www.google.com/history/privacyadvisor/search https://www.google.com/history/privacyadvisor/search Make sure to access it while not signed in to Google, but using a browser mode which persists cookies (ie, not incognito mode). The actual control is https://www.google.com/history/optout https://www.google.com/history/optout Here's the equivalent for YouTube signed-out watch and search history: https://www.youtube.com/feed/history https://www.youtube.com/feed/history . Click "Clear All Watch History," then click "Pause Watch History," then choose "Search history" and repeat those 2 steps again. Do all of this from each device you use Google or YouTube from.
jancsika 8y ago
So if I search for the value of PI while visiting Indiana it could show "3?"
mastazi 8y ago
Youtube does that as well, and it has for a long time I guess, since I have been consistently able to reproduce the following: 1. open Youtube's home page in your main browser, while logged out and after clearing cookies 2. open the same page in a "virgin" browser (e.g. a newly created VM or even just using an incognito window) observe that 1 has some amount of "personalisation". When I saw this the first time I was baffled, so I did some research and found out that it's because of local storage. As per step 1, I was clearing just the cookies but not local storage. Lesson learned: don't just clear cookies, remember to clear local storage as well
known 8y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Profiling_(information_science) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Profiling_(information_science...
r_singh 8y ago
This is honestly the worst thing ever, I've started noticing this too while testing SEO for different projects. What if google becomes like Netflix? Only shows you results you expect, honestly a progression towards that has already rendered google search quite useless for most of my searching. I prefer searching HN on Algolia, Reddit, Medium and other websites (not at the top of my head) to find unexpected resources that I expect google "search engine" to give me.
jeisc 8y ago
my own private Idaho['google']
rv-de 8y ago
Maybe that explains why Google gave me 1st-page results about "shrooms" few days ago while my search term was specifically asking for "Champignons" and "pizza" and whether to pre-boil or use them raw.
Ahmadi31a 8y ago
Tabasompz

350 points by dcu 8y ago

I think this should be considered the original source instead? https://spreadprivacy.com/google-filter-bubble-study/ https://spreadprivacy.com/google-filter-bubble-study/

nailer 8y ago
So much Vox media blog spam on HN - yesterday their Tumblr story (wrapping Tumblr's official announcement and adding very little) hit front page, and the official announcement (posted earlier and modded up first) was marked as dupe.

maxehmookau 8y ago

Why is a study required to know this? Google, surely, should make this known in their privacy policy?

wmeredith 8y ago
They literally announced it on their blog in 2009. https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/personalized-search-for-everyone.html https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/personalized-search-... I'm a DDG fan, but they doth protest too much sometimes.
- Bartweiss 8y ago
  That 2009 announcement makes several very specific promises which conflict with these results. It promised signed-out customization based on prior search history (which Google has confirmed Incognito doesn't use), with a notification and option to disable that customization. This result finds substantial variance with no notification and no toggle, which extends almost unchanged into Incognito. I think Occam's Razor says this is about localization and device type than fingerprinting, but it's definitely not just the thing they announced in 2009.

btgis 8y ago

Even if I use an addon that deletes my cookies from Google every time I close the tab?

bilbo0s 8y ago
Google has more than cookies deployed to get after you. There are a myriad number of tracking vectors they can use. (And to be fair, so can any of the other companies out there tracking everything.) Deleting cookies is certainly a start, but it's not sufficient to maintain privacy.
- gruez 8y ago
  i know there's a bunch of ways to track people without cookies (supercookies, browser fingerprinting, etc.), but is there any evidence that they're being deployed by google or any of the big western advertising companies?
  - wgerard 8y ago
    I can say for certain that I worked for a company that wasn't Google and employed plenty of ways to track people that didn't involve cookies. We used it mostly to try and track malicious users (banned users, etc.) but it's still tracking nonetheless. It was reasonably effective. I'm sure a company of Google's size and sophistication has many more advanced methods than we did.
    - shaki-dora 8y ago
      Nobody is questioning their ability. It’s their willingness that’s relevant, and considering they are liable for a far more damaging PR nightmare than almost any other company, it’s not out of the question that they might not actually use every trick in their arsenal.
stupidbird 8y ago
Do you switch IPs, browsers, computers, etc every time you close the tab too? If not, Google tracks you.

zepto 8y ago

Is anybody the least bit surprised? It’s been obvious forever that google has absolutely zero respect for privacy. Yes, this can be rationalized as ‘improving search results’, and indeed the results may be better. But, it’s also building a personal profile without consent, or indeed with implied lack of consent. If google cared about privacy, they would simply offer people the option not to be tracked, and respect it. They don’t.

endymi0n 8y ago

I'm the last one to say you shouldn't scrutinize what Google does, but this is complete non-news. In the beginning, I was suspecting actively used logged-out cookies like Facebook infamously uses for example (try it, they're showing your face and keep tracking you all over the web). Reading on about differing search results in private mode, I was then expecting something like Google actually using IP + Fingerprint matching, which would be way more devious. In the end, this was purely about Google showing a different page to everyone. Playing the devil's advocate, this is about the only way to escape the exploration/exploitation dilemma. Is DuckDuckGo seriously complaining that Google is basically A/B testing everything, all the time? Because if that's the case, their data scientists should take some notes here.

ravenstine 8y ago
Maybe it's complete non-news to you. Facts aren't simply pointed out once and ubiquitously committed to the public consciousness. There's nothing wrong with a healthy reminder.
- ucaetano 8y ago
  Well, this has been public for the past 9 years... https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/personalized-search-for-everyone.html https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/personalized-search-...
  - KevanM 8y ago
    God forbid somebody joined the internet or became aware of privacy issues in the past 9 years.

matt4077 8y ago

The study’s result seem to be that users often get unique results. That’s not the same as “personalized”, and it certainly isn’t evidence of “bias” as the spreadprivacy.org-link suggests. A good faith interpretation would point to google running learning algorithms on their results. That would also seem to be a far better explanation for Google changing parts of the page layout, such as the position of news and video results. The use of the term “bias” for describing differences search results also trips my conspiracy theory detectors.

anyzen 8y ago

Am I missing something? Google gives me the creeps as much as it does to any sane person, but if I understand correctly, DDG is comparing just the variation of results on each page. This doesn't mean that you're still in the (same) bubble when you log out. How about comparing the logged-in data with logged-out / private tab data? Did they find these two sets related? If not, G could be just implementing some sort of A/B testing on grand scale (learning from clicks and making search algorithm better).

skybrian 8y ago

It sounds like they found a lot of variation but not that the differences are biased in any particular direction? Could this be random? The use of "filter bubble" doesn't seem justified if it looks like random variation.

gowld 8y ago

I'm not sure I'm comfortable which a critique written by an economic competitor (DuckDuckGo) that obscures its identity and doesn't disclose its conflict of interest.

s3r3nity 8y ago
Well I mean what's wrong with the study itself? If you think DDG might have biased the structure or even falsified results, fine - make that claim. But otherwise this shouldn't really matter. Otherwise we're going to go down a rabbit hole of arguing on subjective matters, like why trust DDG, rather than pointing out objectively what's wrong with the research.
hirundo 8y ago
Well it does say that it's the DuckDuckGo Blog, and it has the DuckDuckGo logo at the top. That's not very obscure. https://spreadprivacy.com/google-filter-bubble-study/ https://spreadprivacy.com/google-filter-bubble-study/
Ensorceled 8y ago
How exactly is DuckDuckGo’s identity “obscured”? There’s the DDG duck up in the corner for heavens sake.

icebraining 8y ago

Welcome to 2009, I guess "Today we're helping people get better search results by extending Personalized Search to signed-out users worldwide (...)" https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/personalized-search-for-everyone.html https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/personalized-search-...

wnevets 8y ago
Sounds like the "study" should have been just a google search.
- detaro 8y ago
  Because "they do X" makes looking into "what do the results of X look like" a completely pointless question?
  - icebraining 8y ago
    Yeah, the problem is more with the headline than the study.
harshvladha 8y ago
There's a difference between Signed out, and Incognito (no cookies)! + People generally tend to miss the point that Incognito doesn't prevent sharing the IP of the user. + I think DuckDuckGo's study missed out using VPN in their analysis. i.e., SignedIn vs Incognito vs (Incognito+VPN)
- Kalium 8y ago
  > There's a difference between Signed out, and Incognito (no cookies)! Is there? I was under the impression that Incognito and its cousins generally still accept and preserve cookies for the duration of the temporary session. This means that for this purpose, there isn't really a difference.
  - 8y ago

Yetanfou 8y ago

I always assumed they would, just like Youtube 'recommends' videos for you whether you're logged in or not. This is one of the reasons why I don't use Google / Bing / etc directly anymore, instead I use them through a meta-search engine (using a local instance of Searx [1] with some extra code to have it search my local content as well [2]). [1] https://github.com/asciimoo/searx https://github.com/asciimoo/searx [2] https://github.com/asciimoo/searx/pull/1257 https://github.com/asciimoo/searx/pull/1257

thecleaner 8y ago

New study ? You just have to open two different browsers and open use them for a couple of days and its quite obvious. Question is whats the problem with this ?

deleted 8y ago

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annadane 8y ago

This would all be fine if it were opt-in but all these companies who insist on excessive reliance on algorithms just end up making their service worse.

jacamat 8y ago

Localization != personalization.

xiphias2 8y ago
I agree, they are completely orthogonal features. The only personalization that's happening is inside the new session that the person creates when using incognito mode, which is understandable.
deleted 8y ago
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netcan 8y ago

To me, constantly complaining about sites/companies doing this stuff or wanting laws to make them stop... It just feels silly and pointless. In the long term, companies will gather and use what data they have access to. Companies will tailor their UI, product, etc. in order to keep that data flowing. A ruleset based on permission and consent is not practical, unless the goal is "better paperwork." The solution (imho) has to come from browser software or w3c. The browser should control permissions, in broadly the same way mobile OSs/appstore control permissions and login state. ATM Google de-anonymizes you. This should just be impossible, unless the browser tells it who you are. ^I know gdpr is popular with a lot of people here. I think it has some good parts, but I disagree with other parts. We can still be friends and disagree :)

ucaetano 8y ago
This isn't necessarily de-anonymizing, it is just taking your recent history into account. From 2009: For example, since I always search for [recipes] and often click on results from epicurious.com, Google might rank epicurious.com higher on the results page the next time I look for recipes. Other times, when I'm looking for news about Cornell University's sports teams, I search for [big red]. Because I frequently click on www.cornellbigred.com, Google might show me this result first, instead of the Big Red soda company or others. Previously, we only offered Personalized Search for signed-in users, and only when they had Web History enabled on their Google Accounts. What we're doing today is expanding Personalized Search so that we can provide it to signed-out users as well. This addition enables us to customize search results for you based upon 180 days of search activity linked to an anonymous cookie in your browser. It's completely separate from your Google Account and Web History (which are only available to signed-in users).
craftyguy 8y ago
> To me, constantly complaining about sites/companies doing this stuff or wanting laws to make them stop... It just feels silly and pointless. A significant percentage of HN content is posts about "facefriend does this with your data" or "google does that with your data." I suspect this might be why it feels especially silly and pointless, because currently the noise to signal ratio is quite high if you spend any time on HN. For the vast majority of the rest of the population, it's all noise and no signal. So here we are with one group that works "in the industry" that is largely desensitized to it, and another group that doesn't care, or know they should care.

nottorp 8y ago

The problem is, these "personalized results" have become mostly useless. For more technical (or simply specific) queries, Google seems to vomit useless only vaguely related links instead of, you know, pages that cover what i searched for. This does more to encourage me switching to some other search engine than any privacy concern.

hinkley 8y ago
For a lot of topics I just find myself with a lot of fake answer sites these days. About once a week I’ll get almost an entire page of results that way. Seems like dark SEO is winning.
- basil-rash 8y ago
  I had actually forgotten about those until just now. I use Bing for most of my searching (I fall back to Google in the semi-rare cases where Bing doesn't work), and fake answer sites don't seem to be as prevalent on Bing. Maybe those sites tailor their SEO to Google's algorithms? Or maybe I've just grown numb to their presence.
  - nottorp 8y ago
    Fake answers are another problem, I'm talking about stuff like Google dropping a word from my query because it feels there aren't enough results that include it. Edit because I can't reply any more: As dsfyu404ed says below, it tends to drop the central term of the query, making the results 100% useless. Not that they're particularly useful even if it doesn't do that...
    - dsfyu404ed 8y ago
      > I'm talking about stuff like Google dropping a word from my query because it feels there aren't enough results that include it. It's particularly infuriating when it drops the location word from a search query for info on law and regulation. I don't care if broad form automotive insurance is available in some non-specific state, I care about if it's available in the state that I put in the query. Edit: Why is this downvoted?

ssalka 8y ago

Strange as it is, I was just researching whether it was possible to search Google truly anonymously - stumbled upon a Firefox add-on called Searchonymous [0]. Planning on trying it out today. If all else fails, can always use another search engine ;) [0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/searchonymous/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/searchonymous...

whizzkid 8y ago

Safari 12 is impressive when it comes to preventing browser fingerprinting and cross-site tracking. I wish it was cross platform. Not sure though how much it can do against Google.

deleted 8y ago

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rdtsc 8y ago

I remember Paul Graham gave a keynote at one of the Pycons some years ago. It was about interesting ideas that you might want to work on in the future. One idea was to build a search engine that returns unpersonalized results. He talked about how Google will be moving into a "it's true, if it's true for you" kind of world. His idea was that it will open new opportunities. I think DuckDuckGo is one example, and they've grown and are doing pretty well. I think a lot of it comes as a reaction to Google, Facebook and other such things. "It's true, if it's true for you" is also a great phrase worth remembering. It describes so much about the current world and where things are headed, and why some things seemed to have gone off rails.

ur-whale 8y ago
While I have switched to DuckDuckGo a long time ago, there basically is no proof they're actually not doing exactly what Google does.
- anon4242 8y ago
  The funny thing is that what DuckDuckGo is doing is actually working... By limiting ads to the search words they manage to provide relevant ads (insofar any ads are ever relevant). It turns out that when I search for "office chair" I'm actually not shopping for the Macbook Pro I was looking at a month ago... :O
- Wowfunhappy 8y ago
  You're asking for proof of a negative. DuckDuckGo just put out a post criticizing Google for personalizing search results. They're a small company without many resources, and privacy has been their primary selling point from the get-go. Yes, DuckDuckGo could also be personalizing their own results, but if they were and people found out, there's risk of a significant outcry. Until I see evidence to the contrary, I'm inclined to assume good faith. See also: discussions around "but how do we know for sure that Apple has better data privacy than Google?"
  - dna_polymerase 8y ago

rc_kas 8y ago

Well .. they certainly do a shitty job at personalizing my results. These days I can never find what I want on Google. I've resorted to using other search tools (github search, reddit search, stack overflow search, ddg, etc)

godelski 8y ago
I feel like this has happened everywhere. YouTube included.
mitchellford 8y ago
Same experience. Oh well. All good things come to an end. I wonder what happened?

xiii1408 8y ago

I've observed this a lot when working on SEO for my webpage. I'll be like, "Cool, I'm the top result for my name!" And, yes, this will be true for people searching from Berkeley, where I live. But if I go to an IP address over in SF, I'm not even on the front page.

jammygit 8y ago

My search results have been personalized for years without being logged in. I didn't realize this was surprising.

51lver 8y ago
It's a little more shocking when they can identify 3 different users on 1 pc behind one ip in roughly 1 search. Seriously, freaks me out. I search on youtube for airplanes on the computer tv and suddenly a ton of music I like pops up. Kid searches for some kids show, and many more pop up. Wife searches for reviews or some shitty trash tv shows, and she get's all her interests recommended next. They know us on one computer on one ip without being logged in.

ggggtez 8y ago

I think I agree with the complaints about this study. Unique doesn't mean personalized. IP geo-location, ISP... Don't forget browser and OS versions... there are lots of things you can sample over without actually representing any info leak from your logged in session. Someone searching "at the same time" could technically be different times (remember time zones!) for the purposes of the algorithm (is the search during "work hours" or not, etc). Users checking results on mobile phones compared to desktops... Without more details of how they controlled for these factors, the conclusion doesn't really follow. Edit: I think to really measure the conclusion, they'd need 87 people in the SAME geo location, perhaps on fresh out of the box devices. That would be the best way to create the "placebo" group for their test, which they don't seem to have done.

tr33house 8y ago
containers

ssharp 8y ago

I'm pretty certain, based on experience in my household, that Google's display network, Facebook, and Amazon are all doing some sort of targeting outside of cookies/pixels. My assumption is that it's based on your IP address.

cartercole 8y ago

we have known this and they state it publicly... who funded this?

sorum 8y ago

Here’s Google’s search liaison clarifying things 2 hours ago on Twitter. Localization shouldn’t be confused with personalization. Disclaimer: I work at Google, but not in search https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1070027261376491520?s=21 https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1070027261376491520...

TeMPOraL 8y ago
I can buy the "eventual consistency" argument, and maaaybe even the desktop/mobile argument, but location and language are part of what people mean by "personalization" (even if not technically correct), and frankly, they're the most annoying part. I suppose that Google wants to optimize for people typing "football" in their search engine, at the expense of those trying to type "football results $countryname", or something more precise. But this seems ultra-annoying for anything more substantial than random trivia searches. As for language, well, years ago I set my default search engine in Chrome to explicit "https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%s" https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%s", because language optimization made 80+% of my searches return wrong answers. I admit I might be in a minority here, insofar as English-speaking people with work to do are a minority.
- Bartweiss 8y ago
  > location and language are... the most annoying part This is a constant frustration - I fight with this feature every time I search for info about some place I'm not, for instance to plan travel. Searching with a country/state/zip alongside the query helps, but it's a kludge that's much worse than actual location-specificity, especially if one is going to an ambiguous place like Portland or Washington. I'd very much prefer it if Google offered the same sort of mechanics as weather sites: defaulting to my location, then offering a little box saying "search as if I'm located in:". Instead, the only option is "use precise location", which is no more helpful than basing location on my IP and history. In this sense, it's the same standard-uses-only paternalism that plagues Android. Maps on desktop has a great feature of "leave at" or "arrive by", which was removed from mobile in favor of a 'helpful' integration that can notify you about when to leave. It's terrible for anyone who wants to check a route for odd travel hours, or even do something as simple as decide when to set an alarm based on likely morning traffic. And so, of course, people have been requesting the more flexible option for years while consistently being told that the existing version is "more helpful". Increasingly, this stuff doesn't just bother me on a privacy or information-neutrality level. It's actively damaging, to the point where DuckDuckGo is actually more usable for certain types of search.

laxd 8y ago

Beeing hooked on rust the programming language and rust the game at the same time has been interesting google-wise. I used to take it granted to get rust programming results. And now google seems really confused. And I'm not getting good results for either. "Personalized search matters". And also. Fuck privacy invasion.

dzonga 8y ago

study finds in 2018. I found out google was 'listening' when I got youtube recommendations on my friends laptop in 2012, when I wasn't signed in, that I get on mine. Btw our youtube habits are different. Given his playstation had different recommendations.

guix992 8y ago

What's been a shame is that there is still no open source Search Engine despite this being a "solved" problem. Like not even something like there is a docker image that you throw at your cluster that gets you faster and faster search results. That's the real shame. We should've commidified the core of search engine by now with programmatic and API access as commonplace and yet here we are where search engine software is still dominated by proprietary services.

Gaelan 8y ago
I’m guessing that it’s impractical to self-host something big enough to be useful.
- guix992 8y ago
  I don't believe that is a good enough limitation in this day and age of docker and kubernetes. You take the search engine docker image and keep scaling the number of nodes that are running it in the cluster till your search result time is fast enough for you.
- cabaalis 8y ago
  I am sure this already exists even as I type it, but this sounds like a great job for a distributed system running a federated search protocol.
  - guix992 8y ago
    The hard part is already solved, you don't even have to crawl the web to build the index. There is already a periodically refreshed index of the web that you can download: commoncrawl.org Now someone just needs to configure, Apache Lucene as a proper docker image that can consume this index.

troydavis 8y ago

Here's where Google (barely) exposes an option called "Signed-out search activity" retention: https://www.google.com/history/privacyadvisor/search https://www.google.com/history/privacyadvisor/search Make sure to access it while not signed in to Google, but using a browser mode which persists cookies (ie, not incognito mode). The actual control is https://www.google.com/history/optout https://www.google.com/history/optout Here's the equivalent for YouTube signed-out watch and search history: https://www.youtube.com/feed/history https://www.youtube.com/feed/history . Click "Clear All Watch History," then click "Pause Watch History," then choose "Search history" and repeat those 2 steps again. Do all of this from each device you use Google or YouTube from.

jancsika 8y ago

So if I search for the value of PI while visiting Indiana it could show "3?"

mastazi 8y ago

Youtube does that as well, and it has for a long time I guess, since I have been consistently able to reproduce the following: 1. open Youtube's home page in your main browser, while logged out and after clearing cookies 2. open the same page in a "virgin" browser (e.g. a newly created VM or even just using an incognito window) observe that 1 has some amount of "personalisation". When I saw this the first time I was baffled, so I did some research and found out that it's because of local storage. As per step 1, I was clearing just the cookies but not local storage. Lesson learned: don't just clear cookies, remember to clear local storage as well

known 8y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Profiling_(information_science) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Profiling_(information_science...

r_singh 8y ago

This is honestly the worst thing ever, I've started noticing this too while testing SEO for different projects. What if google becomes like Netflix? Only shows you results you expect, honestly a progression towards that has already rendered google search quite useless for most of my searching. I prefer searching HN on Algolia, Reddit, Medium and other websites (not at the top of my head) to find unexpected resources that I expect google "search engine" to give me.

jeisc 8y ago

my own private Idaho['google']

rv-de 8y ago

Maybe that explains why Google gave me 1st-page results about "shrooms" few days ago while my search term was specifically asking for "Champignons" and "pizza" and whether to pre-boil or use them raw.

Ahmadi31a 8y ago

Tabasompz