4 ms·

I've never been a good Google user, never looked at their ads, always used noscript to block them on other sites, and often searched for obscure, little known i

by nsns 15y ago

I've never been a good Google user, never looked at their ads, always used noscript to block them on other sites, and often searched for obscure, little known information on a multitude of subjects. Google used to be immensely helpful, but has become less so recently. Searching for somewhat obscure information now brings up many commercial results which have nothing to do with my search, which, BTW, is often considered to be a typo. In the few times I've searched for consumer goods, most results were for outlets that do not ship to my country, so useless. But I guess I can't complain, they're not making any money out of me, and I'm using them for free.

jrockway 15y ago
Google is not giving you bad results to punish you for blocking ads. The reason why Google is trying to learn more about you is to solve the exact problem you mention above. The Internet is getting bigger and bigger ever year, and the average cross section of the Internet is becoming less relevant to specific users. That's why signals like your search history or your friends' Google+ posts are useful; they can narrow down the infinite torrent of results to something that's useful to you specifically. This may be a little creepy but there's not much else you can do other than to build an index of the Internet yourself and tweak the ranking algorithm to suit your preferences. Google gets a lot of press for collecting your personal information, but every site on the Internet does it. Go through your browsing history and figure out how to ask the sites you visited to delete your IP address, cookie hash, and user agent from their access.log. Pretty difficult. (I'm not completely understanding why it's Google specifically that you care about making sure doesn't have your personal information. Is the imagined scenario that someday the government is going to officially hate people that meet profile X, raid Google's servers to get user profiles, mine the data to find people that meet profile X, and then hunt them down and lock them in a concentration camp? If you meet profile X and the government wants to lock you up for it, won't they eventually get you without Google's data?)

by nsns 15y ago

jrockway 15y ago

Google is not giving you bad results to punish you for blocking ads. The reason why Google is trying to learn more about you is to solve the exact problem you mention above. The Internet is getting bigger and bigger ever year, and the average cross section of the Internet is becoming less relevant to specific users. That's why signals like your search history or your friends' Google+ posts are useful; they can narrow down the infinite torrent of results to something that's useful to you specifically. This may be a little creepy but there's not much else you can do other than to build an index of the Internet yourself and tweak the ranking algorithm to suit your preferences. Google gets a lot of press for collecting your personal information, but every site on the Internet does it. Go through your browsing history and figure out how to ask the sites you visited to delete your IP address, cookie hash, and user agent from their access.log. Pretty difficult. (I'm not completely understanding why it's Google specifically that you care about making sure doesn't have your personal information. Is the imagined scenario that someday the government is going to officially hate people that meet profile X, raid Google's servers to get user profiles, mine the data to find people that meet profile X, and then hunt them down and lock them in a concentration camp? If you meet profile X and the government wants to lock you up for it, won't they eventually get you without Google's data?)