On android, try turning off search suggestions, it is a literal maze as depicted:
https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/106230?hl=en&co=...
In firefox android it is a simple toggle button under settings->search.
I believe the linked documentation is account wide including going to google.com in Microsoft Edge and then typing into the search box on the website. It's not surprising to me that turning off behavior on across your account in any context can't be done in browser settings.
Sure, but it’s not just querying based on what you type in. It takes what you typed, adds it to the model of you built from your past searches and web history and tailors the results to match a mixture of
A) what it thinks today-you wants based on yesterday-you
B) what someone else is willing to pay to inset above the results of a)
It’s way less benign than you make out.
They also aggregate all the similar searches and correlate that over geography and demographics, and probably sell that. They can predict infection progress through a population from search terms.
Admittedly, that’s useful… but it also feels “underhand” in a way that simpler “product->fee->customer” relationships used to work.
I think most users genuinely do prefer to get personalized suggestions instead of irrelevant ones. Firefox is still doing this by default implies pretty strongly to me that the feature is a meaningful benefit to the product, and isn't just in Chrome as a covert data collection mechanism.
I don't believe that (b) is true for Google (paid placement in autocomplete). Google, for all it's flaws, does consistently mark Ads as Ads. I'm pretty sure smaller companies like Yelp and Uber are much more likely to be doing some "secretly paid placement" than Google (but I'd still presume any one of them is not).
You're probably right. I also muddled "search results" and "autocomplete suggestions".
I think Monsanto, Goldman Sachs, Palantir, Comcast, Juul, Uber, any defense contractor, Nestle, Philip Morris, etc are at least arguably less ethical work than even Meta, and get less flak just by being behind slightly less visible to users.
While there's many legitimate serious criticisms of both Meta and Google, I think many of the concerns are misdirected or overexaggerated. The omnibox thing mentioned in the comic is a pretty concrete example to me of a false criticism: the Chrome feature is that it fetches query suggestions for what you've typed so far, which means it's going to be sending what you've typed to a server. Firefox also does exactly same thing and continuously sends what you are typing to Google or Bing to fetch query suggestions, and I don't see people writing this same comic about how Firefox is somehow evil to implement such a feature.