News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Google Now Personalizes Everyone’s Search Results (Even L... by barrkel on Friday December 04, 2009 @08:24PM (#977561)
Google's core service, the simple page http://www.google.com/ , has been getting more and more borked and broken over the past year, and especially over the past few days.

As it is, Google has been rewriting search result links so that they redirect through Google before forwarding to the final destination. It causes a noticeable delay, never mind the privacy implications. I've disabled this through a Greasemonkey script called googlePrivacy.

Now (as of today, on Firefox), they have fiddled with their home page, so that it gradually "fades in" when you mouse over it. Unfortunately, the googlePrivacy script interacts poorly with this, effectively disabling the fading in - leaving you with a very bare Google home page.

Also new behaviour, google.com keeps redirecting to google.co.uk, so much so that I've had to change my Google shortcut to http://www.google.com/ncr and install a Google US country-specific search provider, since Google's new behaviour essentially broke Firefox's built-in Google search provider. They also lost my search settings (in particular, I prefer 100 results per page).

Some, or many, of my problems may be caused by poor interaction with googlePrivacy, but the old ways worked, goddammit, and I am irked that I am unilaterally being frog-marched to a new version of client-side Google that I never asked for and don't want.

Re:Google Now Personalizes Everyone’s Search Results (Even L... by somecanuck on Saturday December 05, 2009 @01:21PM (#978347)
Try OptimizeGoogle (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/52498) instead. It allows you to remove click tracking, as well as other features.
Re:Google Now Personalizes Everyone’s Search Results (Even L... by barrkel on Saturday December 05, 2009 @07:29PM (#978896)
Looks like an update of CustomizeGoogle, which I had stopped using owing to compatibility. Thanks.
Re:Google Now Personalizes Everyone’s Search Results (Even L... by gradschool on Friday December 04, 2009 @08:48PM (#977582)
One shouldn't fault Google for capitalizing on most people's low regard for their own privacy when the opportunity exists. If it's giving you grief, why don't you use a search engine with a better privacy policy?

http://clusty.com/privacy

Re:Google Now Personalizes Everyone’s Search Results (Even L... by drunkpotato on Friday December 04, 2009 @09:25PM (#977629)
One shouldn't fault Google...

Why not?

Re:Google Now Personalizes Everyone’s Search Results (Even L... by Fixnum on Friday December 04, 2009 @08:58PM (#977602)
Cool, but the IP and associated search query are still stored, no?
Re:Google Now Personalizes Everyone’s Search Results (Even L... by pbhjpbhj on Friday December 04, 2009 @09:26PM (#977630)
> "Google's core service, the simple page http://www.google.com/

Anyone got stats/link for this showing relative amount of searchbar traffic versus that on the landing page.

I mainly use google (my main SE) via a keyword in the FF address bar.