Google Changes

[A_Traveller]

Google whom as we know 'Does no evil', made an amendment to their search system on December 4.

Here's the announcement from Google LINK

Now the interesting thing here is that unless the individuals opt-out search results for you will be different from your friends, colleagues etc.. Is this a good thing or bad do you think?

Thoughts?

Regards

/edit typo//

[trogers]

The bad thing is that they are tracking YOU in order to provide this unrequested service.

http://www.forbes.com/2009/12/07/ftc-priva...-targeting.html

I am running Ghostery addon in my FF to reduce such tracking:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/9609

[A_Traveller]

^ Thanks for the Ghostry add-on.

Still interested in other members take on this.

Regards

[katana]

I tried the Ghostery Add-on but found it seemed to give Firefox a memory leak and after a while was using upwards of 500 MB of RAM.

Disabling it got rid of this behaviour.

[nikster]

Still interested in other members take on this.

Horrible idea. Not just on privacy grounds, also on merit - I think search results that take into account my own search history will be worse than neutral search results.

An example would be that I search for something - but I need to phrase it differently, use different words and so on to get what I am really looking for. If Google is storing the intermediate search results that will make all my future results worse.

And yeah, Google saving all my previous searches - thanks, but no thanks.

Thanks for the reminder, BTW, I had not yet disabled this. To do so:

- Go to Google.com, click on My Account in the top right corner

- Go to Products -> Edit

- Click on "Remove Web History Permanently"

The fact that they didn't exactly make this easy also pisses me off somewhat. How hard would it have been to, instead of posting the above instructions on the FAQ page, just provide a direct link that does it.

[elcent]

Mr. Schmidt from Google said: "If you don't want the things that you're doing online getting published or stored, don't do it."

Quite a dangerous development.

Google is supported by lobbies that want to control, totally control the world.

[nikster]

Absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Google really needs some competition.

[cdnvic]

Bing isn't as good as Google, but I use it a lot just because of comments like Schmidt made when Google turned evil. I'm already used to MS's evil.