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Choose whether Search can show you personal results based on your Google Account
- xvector 5y agoThe best solution, IMO, is using Firefox with First-Party Isolation enabled, Multi-Account Containers, and Cookie Auto-Delete. This way you can whitelist sites per-container for persistence, while starting with a clean slate everywhere else on the web. Adding a VPN makes fingerprinting just a bit harder, when combined with Firefox's anti-fingerprinting settings.
- amelius 5y agoIt would be great if Firefox allowed us to create "fake" e-mail addresses too, so we can subscribe to different services without giving away our identities.
- evolve2k 5y agoI’m guessing your alluding to duckduckgo’s recent announcement around private email addresses. https://www.spreadprivacy.com/introducing-email-protection-beta/ https://www.spreadprivacy.com/introducing-email-protection-b...
- mataniko 5y agoThey do, It's called Firefox Relay. https://relay.firefox.com/ https://relay.firefox.com/
- skinkestek 5y agoanyone here knows if Firefox VPN income is still routed through Mozilla Corporation (the makers of Firefox) or if it goes directly to Mozilla Foundation and becomes useless for browser development? (Because my main reason for using Firefox VPN would be to support browser development.)
- amelius 5y agoWouldn't it be possible for companies to simply reject e-mail addresses that end with "@relay.firefox.com"? EDIT: Ok, it is answered in the FAQ: > Why won’t a site accept my Relay alias? > Some sites may not accept an email address that includes a subdomain (i.e., the “relay” portion of @relay.firefox.com) and others have stopped accepting all addresses except those from Gmail, Hotmail, or Yahoo accounts. As Firefox Relay grows in popularity and issues more aliases, our service might be placed on a blocklist. If you are not able to use a Relay alias, please let us know.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago"Personalised results" should be something users turn on if they want to try it, not something they have to turn off. User control is not Google's main priority. Money first. Defaults matter. One of their current CEO's main projects before he became CEO was convincing vendors to pre-install a Google search bar. This is not something that can be "turned off". Most users do not change settings, let alone even know they exist. Because of this reality, its defaults that really matter, not options. The defaults chosen define the intent of the company.
- kmlx 5y agopersonalized results are the only reason i, and many others like me, use google. if ddg offered them, i would use ddg.
- bserge 5y agoI used to think the same, but it only results in you going deeper into your own well as Google keeps pushing more of the same shit instead of getting something new/fresh. It also happens on YouTube.
- realusername 5y agoYouTube could be so great, there's tons of great content out there waiting to be seen, it's just impossible to find, the recommendations are complete garbage.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 5y agoSo true. "YouTube search" is not where the money is; it's "recommendations" and "viral videos" that advertising requires. That is the company's priority. If YouTube represents state-of-the-art in "personalisation", that's a very low bar for "improvement" over manual search. Absolute garbage. It reminds me of paid placement in the Alta Vista era because "recommended" results are interpersed with the legitimate search results.
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- mimsee 5y agoSo in essence this is for the people who are in denial, right? Toggling the button doesn't effect what or how Google collects your data, only that you can't see it. "Yes I use Google, let Google collect my info, but under no circumstance do I want to see that info." Like what? If you don't want Google scanning your emails, don't use Gmail. Don't want Google seeing all your queries, don't send them to Google in the first place. Use Duckduckgo or some other service.
- saurik 5y agoI would have guessed this is for people who want to do a "neutral" search query without it being affected by where you are located or your past searches; I am not sure why you would jump to privacy? I guess the options feel a bit like privacy options, looking at it more carefully... but I would still see wanting to turn this off just to avoid ending up in situations where your history pollutes your screen (such as in demos).
- peakaboo 5y agoGoogle records where you are and stores your every search result, and you are not sure how it relates to privacy.
- austhrow743 5y agoClearly they mean how this setting relates to privacy.
- peakaboo 5y agoYou are correct of course. I'm just really tired of seeing Google act like we have options when it comes to privacy.
- mimsee 5y agoI'm talking about privacy because it's easy for people to not realise that this is not a privacy setting. I don't know if disabling the personal results toggle even puts you in to a "neutral" mode of Google since it clearly states at the bottom that: "Some Search results may require additional settings, like Web & App Activity or Location History". Reading more about Web & Web app activity explains it as follows: "If Web & App Activity is turned on, your searches and activity from other Google services are saved in your Google Account, so you may get more personalized experiences, like faster searches and more helpful app and content recommendations."[1] [1]: https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/54068?hl=en https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/54068?hl=en Edit: reworded from personalized results to personal results
- skinkestek 5y agoDoes this mean I get the search results quality from from 2009 back or is search botched on a more fundamental level?
- shadowgovt 5y agoDepends on what you miss from 2009.
- unyttigfjelltol 5y agoFor those of us who aren't constantly logged into Google, the link is simply to a login page.
- jefftk 5y agoThe page is one where you can change a Google account setting for "whether Search can show you personal results based on info in your Google Account"
- busymom0 5y agoFor the last 2 years, I have been having a much hard time searching on Google. Couple quick example: 1. The date filter no longer seems to work. For example, if I search for "reddit dating app" and set the date filter to be "Past week" or "Past month", it still shows me results from few years ago. 2. Using quotes for exact matches often doesn't work for me either. Is this happening for others too?
- MaxikCZ 5y agoYes and yes. Its getting ridiculous..
- Apotheos 5y agoI believe the first example is specifically a reddit problem, due to something they did with their date data. I always search reddit for reviews and at some point, even though the result says "5 days ago" on Google, the result is actually years old when clicking through to reddit.
- busymom0 5y agoI remember having similar issues with more than Reddit. If I remember right, I had similar problems with Quora as well as StackOverflow. I specifically remember this working fine for me and then suddenly it broke for multiple sites. This was maybe 2 years ago though.
- reportgunner 5y agoI stopped using google mainly for these two issues about a couple years ago and honestly, I completely forgot that these issues can be a thing.
- fooblat 5y agoI want a setting for "Search for what I actually typed in the search bar" instead of trying to guess what I meant. I was advised to use advanced search syntax and operators but when I do I get a captcha challenge on every other search.
- omaranto 5y agoI didn't even know google searches could lead to captcha challenges, I've never ever gotten one.
- MauranKilom 5y agoIf I open a new private FF window on my phone while on mobile data and google something, I usually get a captcha. It's kinda ridiculous.
- shadowgovt 5y agoBecause your search isn't tied to previous activity by a human, you trigger the "bot-like search scraping detected" filter.
- Santosh83 5y agoIt is clever tactic by privacy invasive industries to give us theoretically all the knobs to configure privacy but make them so confusing, so many, and scattered in so many places and with so many caveats, that within a rounding error, everyone is going to quickly get fatigued, confused and leave the settings as is, which in most cases is opt-out.
- visarga 5y agosoftware solution - meta config tool
- staticassertion 5y agoThis isn't exactly news.
- londons_explore 5y agoIsn't there a simpler solution to this... Just don't sign in!
- chmike 5y agoI wish I could toggle that switch per requests. In some case I want result relative to my location, or other info, and in other circumstances I want generic results. In some case I want result sorted by most recent first, and others I don't care or want the oldest info. In some case I want results in my mother language and others I want English results as well. Etc. etc. My feeling is that google provides far too few search adjustment knobs and is spoon feeding me with what google thinks that would be relevant for me. The strange thing is that all major search engine are just copying google's behavior on this aspect.
- ArnoVW 5y agoMy solution for this: open an incognito session. So ctrl+shift+N instead of ctrl+N (or RMB and select from menu)
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- sefrost 5y agoThe cookie banner has made this very annoying, especially on mobile devices where you have to scroll to dismiss it.
- pbhjpbhj 5y agoI mean, this must be a clear benefit to Google, they've removed almost all the abilities to target one's search and just about the only thing left appears to be using quotes ("") and that is only used as a weak signal for what is put in the SERPs. There used to be a variable "pws=0" or something that gave non-geographic, non-personalised results.
- ryanianian 5y agoQuotes stopped working ages ago in my experience. Very often I’ll search for a thing in quotes only to follow the top few results where the quoted term appears nowhere using ctrl+f. We are totally subjected to what they think we want. DDG has started doing this too especially if there aren’t that many results.
- gniv 5y agoNote that the page says "personal results", not "personalized results". Even though the submitter chose that title, reading the page carefully I don't see mention of customizing the main search results based on my activity. It's about some specific types of results: autocomplete predictions, results from private data and recommendations.
- tomcooks 5y agoThat switch has been there for a while, no? Mine was already off, for all it matters
- Wolfenstein98k 5y agoTo be honest, I'm using Google because it usually works so well. Hiding the option, without stopping the underlying tracking and data collection, is just denial.
- jeffrallen 5y agoThank you!!!!!
- throwslackforce 5y agoIt seems like a statement in today's announcement... > Personal results in Search include... Personal answers based on info in your Google Account, like “my flights” from Gmail ...makes some aggressively ambiguous wording in a previous announcement [0] apparent... > Consumer Gmail content will not be used or scanned for any ads personalization after this change. So I guess anyone who assumed that "Consumer Gmail content will not be used or scanned for any ads personalization" meant that your Gmail was not being scanned at all was mistaken, since today's setting implies that it was still being scanned for Search personalization? [0] https://blog.google/products/gmail/g-suite-gains-traction-in-the-enterprise-g-suites-gmail-and-consumer-gmail-to-more-closely-align/ https://blog.google/products/gmail/g-suite-gains-traction-in...
- crashbunny 5y agoI vaguely remember years ago reading something about google saying they won't scan gmail because they might unwittingly break some law that is meant to protects kids on the internet. Maybe if they knew your age and you were of age they scanned...
- jvolkman 5y agoWere there people that thought the latter? Certainly there's still an expectation that things like spam filtering work, which require scanning.
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- mgraczyk 5y agoThere is a search bar in Gmail that can be used to search the content of your emails. I think most technical people who have used Gmail realize that it wouldn't be possible for that feature to work without something, somewhere reading your emails to index them.
- maiodude 5y agoI find it ridiculous how pathethically people "fight" for their privacy when they type their complaints on a smartphone. Just stop bitching
- osmarks 5y agoYou're assuming things unreasonably, and in any case more privacy is good even if it's not total.
- elif 5y agoI wish there were a way to turn off personal results based upon country. It feels like google isolates us even further culturally. When I'm in Japan I can search for japanese things easily, but when i'm in america it keeps giving me american-based websites with japanese stuff. I've legit used a VPN just for searching.
- szundi 5y agoIt would be so wonderful to see ex-Google employees founding a new search engine company that is almost as good as Google. Next day they go bankrupt as there is no money inflow without selling our data, but that would be at least one nice day. Someone please invent something that solves this awful problem.
- listmaking 5y agohttps://neeva.com/ https://neeva.com/ ("Get 3 months free, then just $4.95 per month.") (Haven't tried it so I don't know how good it is.) (They have many posts under https://neeva.com/learn https://neeva.com/learn that seem to be anti-Google in slant while being well-informed, as they come from people very familiar with the ad industry and Google's ad business.)
- badkitty99 5y agoThey ruined (a lot of) the internet when they started showing different search results for different users. Pretty abusive of their monopoly
- spinax 5y agoCtrl+F shows nobody has mentioned searx yet, so let me - you can have your cake and eat it, too. searx uses modest resources (2G disk/2G RAM, cloud server friendly) and gives you all the results from all the search engines without being tracked in your end-user browser. Here are some existing public instances to get started (visit Preferences! You can choose your own search engines!) and there are many, many more not listed on this page out there: https://searx.space/ https://searx.space/ Give searx a try - what I like most is that it sees the same top result from 2 sources (say, Google and DDG) and places them as a single entry as first, but then offers a link that neither one of those had (say, Mojeek) as the second result. It actually helps you find more content by spreading out your searches to many engines at the same time and giving the best results grouped.
- coletonodonnell 5y agoI run my own searx instance and it's amazing. One issue I am facing is with images not loading in the Images section sometimes, but other than it's perfect and I recommend it.
- spinax 5y agoJust to share for readers, what are your personal RAM/CPU/disk usage measurements? The instance I use is shared with a small group so my numbers above may be skewed.
- stoicjumbotron 5y agoThanks a lot for this. Will definitely give this a go as I'm using Google for my programming related searches and DDG for normal searches. Will see if this satisfies my needs or not.
- graton 5y agoFYI: https://searx.me/ https://searx.me/ appears to be the link to the project and information on how to host your own setup.
- mimsee 5y agoWow. This seems very cool. I wonder if there's a possiblity to add Stackoverflow as a search engine directly to searx.
- zzzeek 5y agoI actually find the "personal" results useful so when I search for something like "python bug" I get things about issues with Python, not insects and snakes in the wilderness.
- aflag 5y agoFinding issues with Python is the default result for that query, regardless of your user preferences. Finding things about insects and snakes in the wilderness would actually be an example of personal results giving you what you want. Computer related stuff tend to have a stronger online presence than other subjects for obvious reasons.
- guscost 5y agoIs there a toggle for "don't scrub content we have deemed 'misinformation' from search results"?
- gerash 5y agoIt's meant for when you have a flight ticket in your Gmail or a restaurant reservation then if you search the name of the restaurant or flights on Google it'll display a link to your email among the search results. I think it's a brilliant feature and hope they expand it to many other receipts type things in Gmail
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