Google finally admits it wants to OWN YOU Mountain View's Chocolate Factory is putting its vast userbase on notice of major changes to its privacy policies. Come 1 March the 350 million people worldwide who have Gmail accounts, for example, will no longer be able to use that service in isolation of other Google products they browse to online. That's because the …
Google's search results have been in the toilet for several weeks now throwing up irrelevant shite whenever I look for stuff. I'd argue too that so far everyone who's tried these "portal" approached has lost market share because eventually the "portal" eats it's children/users.
I have a Gmail account because I have a Google phone - I don't use it that much and I'll use it less in future.
I think google's search results have been as shit as everyone else's for at least 6 months to a year now.
I have been patiently waiting for someone else to start providing decent results, but I don't think it is going to happen. Big corporations own the internet now and they don't want to provide you the results you want, they want to provide you with the results they want you to want.
I got pointed at DuckDuckGo just before Christmas and so far it has been pretty good. I don't see dozens of 'variant' results and they promise not to track.
To be fair I have no way of knowing if I am getting the best results or if I am actually being tracked but the only failures I have had so far are from fumble-fingered typing. Normally get a good result in the first two pages (of course it expands down rather than paging just to be different but at least it makes tracking back to earlier hits easy).
> they promise not to track.
I think I will start using them for exactly that reason.
It *really* annoys me that Google's results are all Google URLs that redirect. Aside from the tracking issue, it also means that copy/paste is useless.
Perhaps I'll write a FF plugin to extract the real URLs...
Vic.
A plugin called optimized google or something like that is supposed to do it, didn't work when I tried it.
The link re-writing tracking shit seems to be a moving target. I tried and failed to reliably remove the link re-writing with proxomitron filters (but I barely know what I am doing).
So now I mostly use google through scroogle (when google hasn't blocked them) and Bing FFS.
I used to use CustomizeGoogle, then OptomizeGoogle (which used the Customize code-base after the original dev moved onto other things) for years. However OptomizeGoogle, IMHO, got steadily worse and worse at doing its job. I don't think this was the fault of the new dev, more Googles fault with their constant changes (which I'm pretty sure they do on purpose to frustrate these kind of addons/scripts). Its a shame really as OptomizeGoogle had some really neat features. I might give it another try just to see if the situation has improved.
But as someone else mentioned above, the GreaseMonkey addon script above does work.
"...it also means that copy/paste is useless."
What is this about?
On hovering over links in the search results (google.com, on Firefox), I see in the statusbar the original target URLs, and I can as usual right-click and copy-paste them from the results.
Is this a regional issue perhaps? Or is it NoScript being active?
After some (quick) experimentation it seems that Google still serves[1] their links with direct URLs. However, via some Javascript trickery - which naturally won't work if its not enabled - the direct URL is changed on the client machine to direct back through Googles servers (so they know which link you clicked and track you more effectively). This "slight of hand" is also poorly[2] obfuscated in the status bar.
As you seem to have already realised, NoScript prevents the URL changing code from running and so you get to see the direct URL. However if you, like me, use other Google services which require Javascript to work correctly then the above Grease Monkey script seems to be a workable solution to prevent Google directly tracking the link you clicked on without having to enable/disable Javascript all the time.
[1] If I had my tin-foil hat on I would say Google do this so they can still say they serve only direct URLs. which probably satisfies the "average"[3] user. Remember, the "slight of hand" happens AFTERWARDS on the client machine.
[2] Google, again using Javascript, tells the status bar to ONLY show the direct URL when you hover over a link and not the full re-directed URL. However, this falls over when you right click on the link... the true (re-directed) URL is then displayed for that link from that point on until you refresh or navigate away from the page. (This behaviour happens in both Firefox and Chrome)
[3] Like my nan. Or the other "average" user, the one who thinks they know what they're talking about but haven't actually got a sodding clue... Everybody knows one. A perfect example being numpty unknown who recently advised my ex that her BLACKBERRY shouldn't be used for EMAIL!
+1 for using NoScript in Firefox for Google search (I've been using it for a couple of years and haven'y had any issues save the Google search home page looking slightly different). To still use Google's other products (that require javascript) us a second browser, which may as well be Chrome seeing as it's Google's products we're talking about.
I had been using Epiphany (in Linux) as the second browser but am in the process of switching to Chrome for that function.
@KJ: I did the switch to DuckDuckGo when google stopped honoring the '+' properly in their searches. Haven't looked back. I get a small pick up when I type a search into my Chrome browser and end up at someone else's search engine. Cause I know google knows every time I avoid them and that's a good thing.
I do miss google's type-ahead feature though. Saves me tons of keystrokes. (on the other hand, perhaps that's because the already know too much about me...)
Do no evil, indeed.
My ISP does indeed block outgoing port 25 requests. Makes it quite difficult to test whether or not a member of our email bank is functioning properly. Usually have to VPN somewhere else to do that. I suppose I could set up a permanent tunnel and route email that way.
If your ISP doesn't block port 25, the RBL arseholes have probably blacklisted their IP range for them anyway. If anyone has a email tunnel-->SMTP converter that runs on a standard LAMP setup, I'd be interested. It'd have to be spammer proof (ie, locked to specific email address/es or IP range) though.
> If anyone has a email tunnel-->SMTP converter
Errr - SMTP AUTH for inbound, and smarthost the outbound?
If your IP range is RBLed, either you've done something nefarious, or your upstream has been shown to be non-responsive when it comes to dealing with complaints.
It's a pain if you're caught[1] in this, but the alternative is much, much worse.
Vic.
[1] I got myself onto a blocklist a few weeks ago. I'd tried to mail from the command line on a machine where I'd forgotten to set up the domain name. When I put the machine on my own network, the mail was flushed through, and Google got my IP address put on a blocklist, where it remained for about twenty minutes. Silly mistake, easily fixed.
Thanks Vic. I don't think I've had an ISP in the last decade that hasn't been RBL'd. I gather a smarthost is just an ISP's enforced corralling of all SMTP traffic? If people are arranging things such that emails are more easily monitored; then I want to do something else. Because fuck them, that's why. I still haven't got over the shock of governments everywhere legislating themselves the right to read my bloody email.
Back in the day (after ISP-mail dropped an email that cost me a lot of money) I used to run a desktop mailserver. Then -in quite a short timespan- more and more email services were unobtainable; and this has continued until the present; although I'll confess that I haven't checked recently.
So now I bounce email out through my various webhosting accounts...which is alright as it goes and works fine; but I was wondering if there were any more private and self-contained solutions around.
Playboy has a long-standing and largely deserved reputation (among those who look at the non-pink bits) for quality journalism. Of course the main problem is that nobody believes that you buy it for that purpose.
Some of the best journalism happens at the weirdest places, and a consistent winner is, of all things, The Christian Science Monitor.
Greetings and Salutations.
This is a good point. Back in the 70s, I, as a young man, bought Playboy because it was going through a cycle of publishing some of the best science fiction short stories available. There was some fine prose printed in that magazine. And, for all of you nodding your heads and saying "yea, sure...." I will freely admit that, because I have been a fan of abstract art for a long, long time, the pictures were pretty enjoyable too (*smile*)
pleasant dreams
dave mundt
I have been locked out of my own Youtube account as Google would not let me view without some other account setup, I had to log out to get onto Youtube.
Now I have forgotten the pass word.
Will look at the other video upload sites.
As to email I am slowly moving all to one of 3 accounts.
...WHY people are searching for what they are searching.
They want to tell advertisers that they can serve context-sensitive ads. There's little point in showing business-to-business messages for someone searching for a niece's birthday present. Also, once a present is chosen, that shouldn't reflect directly on the interests of the person buying.
If Google sees that we are viewing a Google+ circle of close friends and family when we search, they might proffer different results (and adverts) from when we are interacting with professional colleagues.
The question we 'products' have to answer is whether we will trade Google (and Facebook and Twitter) gaining a deeper understanding of who we are in return for only seeing advertising messages relevant to us.
"The question we 'products' have to answer is whether we will trade Google (and Facebook and Twitter) gaining a deeper understanding of who we are in return for only seeing advertising messages relevant to us."
Not, I think, if we realize that all Social Networks are long distance (by degrees of separation) and the advertising messages are being sent over a (different) short circuit. The "vision" of Google, Facebook and Twitter (in that order) represent three levels of Social Network collapse.
I'm searching for something so that I can find it. If you put a bunch of moving flashing lights in my way, I will think about searching some other way. Even if you put an ad up for exactly the perfectly right thing every time someone looks at your page, you will get a sale from maybe 5 in a million of your visitors instead of 1 in a million. Either way you end up with 999,995+ visitors who suffer varying episodes of annoyance for your efforts and nothing much else. People think if they just tweak the formulas a little bit all of a sudden being advertised at will be a desireable experience or something...
The question we products have to answer is just how much we will put up with being considered a product.
I look at an item in the store, and it occurs to me how things like people pondering strategies for advertising campaigns, bankers working on tweaking a few more points out of all the money they create out of thin air, various seats of government with the cesspool of coutiers that always follow, managers striving for total situational awareness and control, sundry executive level parasites, and I wonder what the $19.99 I'm looking at would be without any of all that - maybe $4? And I wonder what the goal of the game played between free market and planned economies was? Which one was nimble and which one was bogged down with bureaucracy and layers of people adding no value and grunts at the bottom with motivation deficiencies? What exactly did capitalism win? The prize for being the most inneficient soul crushing minutely monitored war hungry dog eat dog inform on your neighbour way of life going? Grumble grumble get off my yard etc...
Capitalism is the best political system going because it's the only one that accounts for people taking the piss. The big problem with it is that people who take the piss tend to end up in charge of things. And therein lies both the problem and the state of the world. I can't think of anything better, though.
"In short, we’ll treat you as a single user across all our products, which will mean a simpler, more intuitive Google experience."
Any chance of El Reg also committing wanton acts upon our privacy so we don't have to login to the sister sites (Channel Reg, Reg Hardware) when going about our commentarding business?
There's a high likelyhood in my mind that Google has, in fact, already been doing this and only recently realized that their privacy policies didn't support it. I'm sure they've been down this road for the better part of a decade, actually.
Is it possible to live up to a credo like "Do No Evil" when all your actions seem to be despicable? Obviously not...
> There's a high likelyhood in my mind that Google has, in fact, already been doing this and only recently realized that their privacy policies didn't support it. I'm sure they've been down this road for the better part of a decade, actually.
I don't know. Google is still ran by geeks, not by marketers. Who else celebrates the hallmarks of geek culture -by altering their logo, no less- these days? What other major website is fully text-browser-compliant? I'm not saying they are not on a slippery slope; but I still trust them to be quite open about the kind of evil they engage in. Well there was this network-sniffing incident of course...
> Is it possible to live up to a credo like "Do No Evil" when all your actions seem to be despicable? Obviously not...
Define despicable. They have been a -if not THE- major support for open source software for quite a few years now, both in terms of contributed code and cash donated, and they are the big player supporting open content from silly lawsuits from the likes of the MPEG LA. They also engage in shadier activities, mostly in the ad-related area -that is how they make money, after all-, but saying that ALL their actions are despicable seems a bit far-stretched.
Disclaimer: I don't have a GMail adress, I don't use either Chrome or Android, and I use Google Search only for about half my search needs. Not exactly a Google fan.
> google, you use to be so good.
Google came from out of nowhere and took the business from AltaVista, HotBot, and the like because they offered fast, lightweight results without excessive advertising or other farting around.
Google has now become that which it replaced.
It is only a matter of time before someone does to Google what it did to its predecessors...
Vic.
That is why, under normal circumstances, I don't let my browser accept cookies from .google.com (via CookieMonster) and don't let my browser run Javascript from .google.com (via NoScript).
On the occasions where I have to log in to a Google service (e.g. a club I'm in uses GoogleDocs, so I have to log in to see them), then I enable both temporarily, do what I need to do, then log out.
My Gmail I get with fetchmail to a server I control.
Is it perfect? No, obviously there are pains in the buns with Maps and the like, and I'm sure my Android phone tattles on me as much as it can, but I can limit the damage.
Unfortunately, as Wall Street realises that Google is a Web advertising company, and that Web advertising isn't worth very much, Google will need ways to make more money - make their advertising more valuable - and the only way to do that is to make it ever more intrusive. And the inevitable backlash by people who just want to be left alone and not marketed at will cause that advertising to become even less valuable.
Not to mention your Google login can also act as an OpenID on other, non-Google websites ... log into StackOverflow with your Google ID and you're also logged into YouTube - they've been doing this for a while now I thought? So is it merely that they're updating their Ts & Cs to reflect the changes they've already made?
To be honest, I use BING most of the time for searches and get exactly what I want. It makes sense for Google to consolidate information from all it's services. Why duplicate when you can organize and consolidate. Once enough cash changes hands, the regulators will go away until they're broke again. Despite that old line about money not being "everything", the fact is, money is everything and once everyone is paid off, it will be business as usual again for Google. By the way, don't expect any resistance to them owning Motorola either. It's in everyone's best interest.
So does this mean that those of us who only have a gmail account (unused, or used to the bare minimum) because of our android phone are now going to have our user details spread all over Google's estate for no good reason? If that's the case then argh, I really want to like you Google, but you keep being such a dick.
What details, and what estate?
You can choose not to use gmail, choose not to sync your calendar, contacts and app settings with google servers, choose not to sign in to google when using the Android browser (or use opera). Then they will know practically nothing about you. And if you don't use them for search then they won't use that data anyway.
I tried that a couple of months ago but Google Groups insisted I logged in to do a search.
Once I deleted the cookies it would let me in to do that search. I have simply used another browser for Gmail since then, and use it only for that.
Multiples accounts on multiple systems can be a wonderful thing, as long as you remember what belongs where.
Overnight my wife and I received e-mails from Google advising us of the new privacy rules from 1 March. Which is interesting, but neither of us have or have ever had accounts with Google, so how did they get our email addresses? The Answer Virgin Media.
Appears we are not the only ones to get these emails if the VM Forum is to be beleived.
As my contract is with VM not Google, the privacy rules I sign up to are VM's and any direct contact by Google would seem to me to be a breach of the Data Protection Act.
...in common with a LOT of other people, is that YOU FAIL to read the T&Cs. I'm not trying to be a smart-arse about this but YOU gave them permission to make changes to the services they, or others on their behalf, provide after you signed on the dotted line AND give your information to third parties in the course of providing those services.
Also, to be fair to Virgin they DID give notice on their website, and send out an emails to the same effect, that they were switching to Google as their email provider rather than continue running their own in-house services inherited from Blue Yonder, NTL, etc.
The following is from: http://shop.virginmedia.com/the-legal-stuff.html
B (1): General
f. Some parts of the services (for example, television channels that form part of our television services and other content on, or accessible via, our television services) are supplied by other organisations. As a result, due to matters outside our reasonable control or for commercial or contractual reasons, Virgin Media Ltd may change, cancel or postpone all or any component part(s) of the services without notice, but giving you reasonable notice of any withdrawals and changes where it is possible to do so. You will be entitled to end these agreements if the changes are significant, as described in paragraph J5.
G (2): By having the services provided by us installed in your home and/or by using them you are providing your consent to use your personal information together with other information for the following purposes:
a. providing you with the services, service information and updates;
Occasionally third parties may be used to process your personal information in the ways outlined above. These third parties are permitted to use the data only in accordance with Virgin Media Ltd's instructions (as applicable).
H (2): Virgin Media Ltd and/or Virgin Media Payments may at any time improve, modify, amend or alter the terms of these agreements and/or the services and their content if:
b. Virgin Media Ltd decide that the services should be altered for reasons of quality of service or otherwise for the benefit of customers or, in Virgin Media Ltd's reasonable opinion, it is necessary to do so;
c. for security, technical or operational reasons;
f. if the changes or additions are minor and do not affect you significantly or we wish to have all our customers on the same terms and conditions; or
g. in all other events, where we reasonably determine that any modification to the relevant system or change in trading, operating or business practices or policies is necessary to maintain or improve the services provided to you.
Mr. Dedoimedo turned me onto it. But it doesn't have a proxy/cache option as far as I can tell.
When I need that, I use 'ixquick' - it also has 'images' and 'videos' search. All searches are encrypted by ssl and the advanced search is very easy to use for beginners and more advanced alike (handy when you forget that google operator such as 'inurl:').
They call it the "world's most private search engine". I'll believe 'em until they let me down.
Read their privacy policy and make up your own mind. In fact I am tending to use it more than DuckDuckGo these days - I think it might have a slight edge over it - I don't know.
Anyway, no reason to be using google anymore for the vast majority of search, especially as I have mentioned just now, they have a highlighting function that works just dandy. Someone at the Reg turned me onto that one. Ta.
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