Slashdot Mirror
Google Tracking Frequent Users
BrianGa writes "According to this article, Google has started placing
a counter on its home page for a small number of its most frequent users.
Most Google users do not have it, but a select few now have a counter that notes
the actual number of searches made. For the curious, an explanatory page
linked to the counter reveals that this is a test, or limited-sample experiment
of a new search counting feature."
isn't this the google.com which logs every single IP + search since it first started?
I have not been able to get to Google for the last week or so. I have checked all the usual suspects like BHO's and other malware...
Did you know that if you install its toolbar and use the advanced features of it (u do by default), it tracks EVERY URL you visit and send it to google servers? Its anonymous so I dont see the harm of it. Google is trying to be better and as long as it doesnt use it powers for doing wrong - I find their technology enlightening.
Dont just mail it - Maileet
Is this the next Ultimate Status Symbol for nerds??
Smeghead every day of the week.
Let's just pray they're not going to do what Yahoo's services to subscribers i.e. refer you to a paid advertisement page before routing you to the right page. Or it might be a nag screen to get you to subscribe to a pay service.
;)
I can almost hear it now...
Google, "I find your lack of faith disturrrrrrrbin'."
--- root@127.0.0.1
So soon I'll have a good idea how often I use Google. Then I realise it is very valuable. Then I'm more nclinced to start to pay for it....
I'm scared.
-- "Can't sleep, clowns will eat me!"
Um, like everyone?
"Much work is lost, for the lack of a little more." -Edward H. Harriman
'You have searched images.google.com fro Heidi+Klum 4,637 times.'... Hope she's not looking down.
google "tracks" the whole dagum internet and your worried about them "tracking" you?
I put track in quotes because associating totals and whatever data with ip addresses isn't exactly a spycam in your bedroom.
bite my glorious golden ass.
Does frequent include searches using sourceid=mozilla-search?
Anyway, someone please capture/mirror the counter for us to check it out, before we ./ google to get our own (or rather, spend our bandwidth trying).
So if you delete your cookies, or use a browser such as Opera which automatically gets rid of them after each session it can't really keep track of you.
Unless they actually *do* log you IP every time you search...
The counter is placed on computer hard drives by a cookie, a software file that a Web site places without the recipient's permission or notification and that transmits information back to the site. "If the number contains more than three digits,'' the counter notes, "you truly are a Google frequent searcher.''
Maybe the article author should Google for browser security/privacy settings to find out how cookies are handled.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Google is not dead.
It's a result of a malicious program "Trojan.Qhosts", which exploits a bug in internet explorer to get access to your pc. Then it alters your hosts file to stop your pc from accessing google.com.
Search google for that "Trojan.Qhosts". Ow, you can't. Okay, then try this link
.sig: No such file or directory
"If the number contains more than three digits,'' the counter notes, "you truly are a Google frequent searcher.''
snip
Whether and when the counter might be placed on the Google screens of all users has not been decided, Ms. Mayer said. "The test is very new,'' she said. " We're still looking at the data.''
"996...997...998...999...hmmmm"
i sure hope they won't combine this with thire marketing, i don't realy want links to penguin porn sites everytime i search for something, since the two things i search for the most is linux and porn ;)
altho linus in a g-string... hmm
I wonder if any of the search engines have actually begun to use search patterns as an insight into consumer demands and profit off of such foresight.
It wouldn't be hard at all for a search engine to identify particularly insightful individuals, ones who consistently search for things in advance of their general availability or in advance of the masses, and use them as a barometer of future consumer demand.
That person could, of course, never know that they were being monitored in such a way. Imagine the possibilities of subverting such a system: make frequent searches for whatever you want and *poof* it appears a few months later.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
This counter is really nothing new. Google states in their privacy policy that they already use cookies to track your usage. And if you use their toolbar (an extremely useful tool), you sent them info on every single website you visit, not just the intentional searches. But Goggle has given clear warning up front of what info would be shared and gives you the ability to disable it and still use the toolbar if you want. Privacy is, and should be, a concern here. But Google appears to be handling it responsibly so far.
Phoenix
How would it be either a privacy issue or a security one. At least moreso than it is at the moment.
If your proxy admin wants to track every Google query and match it to IP address he would just do it. All queries are in plaintext, so there is no privacy or security to begin with.
As for the actual tracking. It would be done by cookies, so the individual PC gets the counter, not the IP address of the proxy.
So no, there is no issue.
I've been told, though I haven't encountered it myself, that they've been counting searches made by individuals for a long time, and that they've even banned some people/IP addresses from doing more than X searches per day.
This happened before the web services API when people would write robots to do specific searches. Obviously, if the robot starts making a search every 5 seconds, that'd be a problem...
Maan
On the other hand, it could be that the entries in the cookie are encrypted and that would put you stright out of luck, but given the number of google users, a valid unencrypted entry should not be that hard to find.
and their EULA is the clearest i've ever seen, from memory, it actually says words to the effect of "stop! don't just click "next"! this is actually worth reading" in large, friendly letters on the cover.
Can someone tell me what this says? I got it today in place of the Google (New Zealand) logo.
Free Java games for your phone: Tontie, Sokoban
They already use cookies containing a user id. So why the sudden privacy concerns in the article?
They could already log your searches if they wanted to. The only difference now is a counter is shown to the user.
Slashdot also archives all the posts like above and the corresponding IP - for extortion when they run out of ad money.
People use Internet Explorer? Computer literate peole use it? That is frightening.
If you don't like what I write don't be a CS and mod it down. Refute it.
Yea I can't spell. So what is your point?
ya both my roommates got this, but QHosts wrote a hosts file in c:\windows\help (not in it's usual location at drivers\etc) which threw me for a loop cuz i wasn't aware that windows would look there for a hosts file (or even that you could have 2 in the first place)
QHosts also adds stuff to your registry, check here for info on what it does and how to undo the changes in your registry.
then reboot (or maybe just re-login might work?), and you should be fine, and google won't be dead anymore (along with altavista, yahoo, msn, ask.com, lycos, hotbot...).
"'It's one of our experiments,' Marissa Mayer, Google's director for consumer products, said. 'We're playing with it to understand what the effects of it would be.'"
So in other words:
1. Add unique user counters
2. ???
3. Profit!
I can see the the marketing section of Google jumping all over this. If they managed to uniquely identify users, they could very well "offer" the most frequent users a subscription based Google, in the terms of "you've been leeching off our free service for so long, how about giving some of that back?" Just assuming, of course.
That's just one of many new possibilities such a user-attributed counter could bring along the road.
parasight.de
"I'd say 'Have a good time,' but arson is still illegal.
Seems like most of the reactions here so far are, it is OK, because it is Google. The geeks choice for a search engine. I like Google, I use Google, and I have no problem with what they are doing, but I just wonder what the reaction would be if it were Microsoft that was doing this (they probably are anyway).
She said the company had deliberately not publicized the counter experiment to keep from skewing how the surfing public would use it.
... and I wonder how much usage they've seen spiking the system since the article was published?
But seriously folks... where do I post my high score?
It used to be my favourite browser for a few years. Lately I've been trying out a lot of others, and finally, recently, I decided to move over to Mozilla Firebird completely. It's not finished and it shows (bugs too), so that's gotta say a lot when I switched to it as my main browser! Only use IE whenever I need to test a website I'm doing.
Also, there's a MS Update that supposedly fixes this hole.
I don't know about you but this article had a hint of sensationalist feel to it, like those TV blurbs: "Breaking News! Your every move tracked! (Tune in at 11 for details)"
The fact is cookies are a very widely used thing, and to paint the picture of google somehow being underhand for "secretly installing this counter on millions of hard drives" is a bit of a stretch. For one thing, it's optional: you can configure most browsers to disallow or block cookies. And it's hardly unique to google, I bet you couldn't find a major media/news web site out there that doesn't use cookies in some form or another. You probably have hundreds of them in your cookie jar, unless you've diabled them in your browser.
And then to equate this to spying? That would be like saying, "Company Foo installed a closed-circuit camera in their lobby! OMG! They can tell everywhere you've been inside their building!" The whole cookie exchange is based on the browser voluntarily accepting it when contacting a server, there's really nothing underhanded about it. And the rules of how cookies work were devised specifically in such a way so that "domain.com" only has access to cookies set for "domain.com" and its subdomains. So the only thing they're tracking is your use of their server, which they already have the logs for anyway.
What's next, some reporter stumbles onto the 'Referer' and 'User-Agent' fields in the HTTP headers, and writes some garbage piece about how "Internet sites secretly know where you came from when you load their page! ANd they know what operating system and browser you use! It's a giant conspiracy, your privacy is at stake!"
happened to me several times when visiting google i got redirected to pages that i visit frequently like this and this. can this be a bug in google bar?
WASHINGTON, DC. The presidential candidate announced his resignation from the election run when tabloid press published leaked examples of google searches performed from his own laptop computer. The candidate was seeking among others for "sucks horse cock", "fetish personal ads" and "hentai sailor pictures". The spokesperson of google.com claimed no knowledge on how this information leaked from his company, but announced a thorough investigation. The candidate declined from any comments, but his political carreer seems to be over for good.
Even if you're infected, you should be able to use localized versions of google, such as:
http://www.google.com.br
[]s Badaro
My sig became obsolete, and I lack the imagination to create a new one.
>Try this kfg Why ?
Google Karma: Terrific, due to obsessive searching syndrome
Seeing as a gazillion IP/search pairs would be too much for even google's mighty RAM, it figures they're using cookies. If so shouldn't it be possible to open up the cookie file and hand edit it?
I mod down anyone who says "I will be modded down for this", regardless of the rest of their comment
I just made it up. I get it from the "imagination place". Wait until I get started about the little girl that gets her nubile budding breasts burned and abused by her radiation therapist :-). "Try not to move honey, this will be over in a minute". Bzzzzzzzzzzzzz....
I do limit the lifetime of all cookies to 1-2 days (depending on my mood when setting up the system) in Mozilla.
/. or other things ;-)
I hope that makes tracing me and building a profile harder. But still I don't have to log in more than once a day into
Thus Google will have a hard time to regonize me as a frequent user.
If you're computer literate you probably know that some sites work (or at least partially) with IE only.
I generally work with mozilla but I have to do some things like online banking via IE.
IE is still faster too, not all that much but it consistenly loads/renders pages faster than Moz. I've got a 100Mbit connection so download speed is not really a factor when comparing loading/rendering performance.
... that you must be new here! I therefore offer you this PRICELESS series of rhyming haikus that will acquaint you to /. faster than an unladen African swallow:
/.!
1. First post! is better
than a beowulf cluster, but
does it run linux?
2. Bittorrent pr0n shared,
but rights of the goatse guy
are belong to us!
3. I A N A L,
But Microsoft and SCO says:
"This is Chewbacca."
4. Yet in other news,
polls show insensitive clods
are from America.
5. Natalie Portman,
both naked and petrified,
covered with hot grits!
6. ?
7. In Soviet Russia,
overlords, for one, welcome
Cowboyneal's profits!
Comprehende now? Welcome to
and then sets several cookies on my computer. I don't actually care, but it shows how little technical proficiency the fact checkers have. Before making a statement like that I'd make sure that my own web site didn't also set cookies.
Chris Kuivenhoven is a thief, beware
I had it and I played around with my cookies to try to trick the counter into giving me more counts. However, I think I played with it too much because after playing around with it, the counter didn't work anymore. Supposedly during the 'test' phase, you only get up to 100 counts, but I had increased it up to I had set the value to 10000 or something and then it stopped working. Oh well.
Searched the web for google counter. Results 1 - 10 of about 1,530,000. Search took 0.07 seconds.
But no Google Counter. =)
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)
From Google Watch Watch:
Google Watch exists because of someone who wants PageRank to value his opinion more than the majority. Go figure.Clever signature text goes here.
"They track every thing we do!
But they are the best search engine on earth!
And Google does track EVERYTHING you surf.
"Nuts 'n Gum - Together at last!"
A man talking sense to himself is no madder than a man talking nonsense not to himself.
I embedded one of my ancient cookies into the script, which is sent to Google every time someone runs it without modifying the cookie data. I've had numerous people write me thanking me for the script. In other words, lots of people have all used "my" Google cookie to delete their own posts from groups.google.com, without problem.
It's kinda like swapping your grocery store discount card with a friend. Sure they're tracking "you," but what they wind up with is a bunch of useless garbage...
"BSD: Free as in speech. Linux: Free as in beer. Windows 10: Free as in herpes." --Man On Pink Corner in #52607549.
I must be on there as I google for info every day :)
Donna was a sick 13 year old girl. She didn't quiet understand what the Doctor had meant with Hodgekins Disease but she knew it was pretty bad for whatever he called it he also said it was a kind of cancer. Her arm pits were constantly swollen and she had had slightly raised temperature for weeks and her left breast had developed a dense litte nub in it that had not been there before. The doctor had told her mother that we would try to go for a Lumpectomy instead of a Mastectomy meaning they were not going to cut away her breasts, at least that is what all those unintelligible medical terms registered on Donna's mind. "Mrs. Brown, the radiation we will use on Donna's chest will cause a little skin reddening over the course of the treatment, nothing worse than a mild sun-burn". Her mother smiled at her and told her, "Getting radiation treatment will be like going to the sun-studio, dear."
Marc was in his late thirties and bored with his job. Yes. He had the perfect job for where could you stare at a woman's breasts through a one-way mirror and get paid for it at the same time? But what kind of breasts would he position under his Varian Clinac linear accelerator? A radiation machine that could give doses of up to 15MeV of photon xray energy and up to 24MeV of electron beams passed through a scattering foil unless they were to burn a hole into the subject exposed to the beam. At a dose rate of one centigray per minute a treatment would be a boring three minutes until another old hag's cancerous mammary tissue had gotten whatever radiation they had coming. He glanced at the treatment roster for the day and nearly spilled his coffee.
Marc was licking his lips in the anticipation. A young girl was about to undergo radiation treatment to the chest and it would be on his treatment table! The week passed and on Monday 9am Marc welcomed the girl and told her to take off her shirt so he could position her on the treatment table. Donna wasn't even wearing a bra yet, he noted at least he couldn't see any telltale tan-lines.
Donna lay on the treatment table looking at the strange machine positioned above her chest and Marc smiled at her reassuringly. "Don't worry, Donna. The machine will make a little noise, just try to lay still and this will be over in a couple of minutes. Just remember not to move, ok?". Marc left the room and Donna's heart pounded while she was waiting for the machine to turn on and deliver the radiation. Marc sat at the operator console, and his cheerful smile turned into a grin of lust as he set the machine not only to deliver the prescribed dose of 1.8 Gy per treatment but increased the dose to 2.5 G. "Maybe I'll give her a little extra dose of 24MeV electrons too", Marc thought to himself as he pressed the key that sent electrons flying through the machine to hit a tungsten target that sent hard photons of radiation into Donna's chest. "I think a couple of cGy of electrons are in order" Marc grinned himself as he started to masturbate...
And we use them more frequently to! How much do we spend a day just to blow stuff up? With all that "ordinance" wasted what happens when we face a real threat?
Yes, there is a danger. The trouble is that Google is currently the best search engine across a number of criteria. If I choose another engine, not only is there a small learning curve for the advanced searches so my personal performance is lower, however the main problem is that the other search engines aren't really in the same league. Yes, I'm sure there are better specialist engines, but for a general purpose one, I stick to Google unless something really is a lot better.
See my journal, I write things there
It doesn't beg the question "how is this news except..."
What you mean to say is, "The real question is how is this news except..."
It begs the question: Is everyone afraid that google will know too much about you by what you search?
The article doesn't presuppose anything, but to someone who is slightly paranoid, they might have been suddenly reminded that google tracks them once that counter appeared, hence the explanatory piece.
Of course, google always tracks everything. That information is used to improve the relevancy metadata they use for providing "similar results", ad-word placement, etc.
The trick is to leverage it in a way to improve the value of google. Maybe a subscription service would expose more of the trends they pick up on as a value added service. I would surely pay for something cool like that.
Fuck Beta. Fuck Dice
I wonder if they are thinking about then doing a pay per search service for heavy users?
must do more searching...
:-)
must not get caught googling all day at work..
If however, you are like most people, and you do draw a line between public and private information about yourself, then Google's innovative strategies combined with its overwhelming market share make it a privacy time bomb just waiting to explode. If Microsoft were behind Google, much of the world would be up in arms (Remember NT's supposed NSA Backdoor?) No so with Google. Strangely, perhaps because Google actually works pretty well and isn't laced with bugs that allow viruses to damage your home computer, no one makes a fuss.
In the recent years the public has sometimes been shocked to learn about some of the side effects that our technological progress has brought. Organizations combining data from multiple databases (for 'marketing' purposes) and technologies such as license plate recognition make possible a 'technical utopia' that Big Brother could only have dreamed about.
This combined with the hightened fear of terrorism and the corresponding (over-)reaction by governments has led to a information gathering infrastructure that is unique in world history. In the post 9/11 world there has been increasing pressure from the American government on organizations and companies (from your local library to European airlines) to forward all types to information to 'the authorities'. Google is most likely just one more intelligence source, though in all probablilty a highly valuable one, in the war against terrorism.
Suspicions that Google has 'ties' with the NSA was published in Slashdot (Should You Fear Google?) last Febuary. After reading some of the comments associated with that article, one begins to wonder if Goggle is just the Internet arm of the Echelon project.
While each tenticle pulling at our privacy is relatively harmless by itself, the combined affect of the multiple attacks on our personal privacy is large and disturbing. Worse still, is that we have only ourselves blame. Our very own democratic governments encourage and protect the individuals and organizations that are attempting to implement these policies. And largely because of own our ignorance and apathy, we don't raise our voices against it.
It's like comparing the public's reaction to a government proposal to mandate the installation of ID chips in its citizens, which causes a massive outcry, vs. parents desire to install the same chips in their children, because of their fear of abductions. The end result may be the same, but in the second case we did it to ourselves.
I guess the moral is that we should just be a bit more aware of what we're doing, and a bit more willing to say 'no'. While the current western decomcratic governments probably do 'have our best interests at heart', what happens when some unsavory character sells or gives this information to our enemies, or worse our government is no longer domocratic and becomes our enemy?
---- It won't be as bad as you fear or as good as you hope, but it will take twice as long as you plan.
I've forgotten the name of the story, but I recall one by Philip K. Dick or Arthur C. Clarke about opinion polls becoming more accurate by narrowing down the process to identifying "the truly average voter." Instead of bothering with the election, this single individual went into the polling place, and basically picked the next president, all by him/her-self.
This is a variation on the same theme, where we spot the trend-setter, or the person whose interests/tastes best reflect what will soon be percieved as those of "Joe Average." It may or may not be the most insightful person. It may just be the "most average," but who happens to stumble upon the "next big thing" first.
Tim
There are a number of websites out there that use the method described above without the API, and Google hasn't done anything about it. My site lists a number of these sites on the links page. Perhaps these sites just don't generate enough traffic to alarm Google, but then again Google has always been very friendly towards its users. I bet they are more concerned about bots used for malicious purposes.
Trojan.Qhosts affects Windows users ... but I have a similar problem affecting a Mac user (system 9.x) whose attempts to reach google.com are being rerouted in the same way. Any ideas what might be causing this?
---
Problems that go away by themselves
also reappear by themselves
---
He's got my vote.
Fuck Beta. Fuck Dice
It's a Trojan, that can be inserted by a "maliciously constructed website". Seems that you Windows geeks had better stop using IE for a while. Opera and Mozilla are nice alternatives...
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/56/33187.html
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
If salon.com was paid by Renault to put their ad on all pages
Does this happen? First of all, few advertisers seem to buy "run of site" web advertising anymore, as it's not nearly targeted enough. Second, there is usually more than one advertiser buying space on a given web site, so Renault isn't going to get every impression served. If a subscriber can buy space on pages he or she is viewing, doesn't that make him or her an advertiser too?
Will I retire or break 10K?
the best part of this whole article was this sentence
"The counter is placed on computer hard drives by a cookie, a software file that a Web site places without the recipient's permission or notification and that transmits information back to the site."
without permission or notification? Man, these dipshits don't know anything about browsers do they? Let alone how to make one prompt you for cookies..
I can't find a current page, but I can find the cached page
It's an amusing read.
I also occasionally surf using telnet to port 80, but I find surfing with WGET to be the most soul-satisfying experience.
Thomas Dz.
I (and probably a lot of other /. people) would probably be one of the "lucky" few to see a search counter, but I hit Google from probably 5 different IP addresses daily. So the results cannot be too accurate. I'd rather not have to log into Google to perform a search either though...
geek n performer who performs morbid or disgusting acts, as biting off the head of a live chicken
Nope, no sig
Hey... it didn't stop Bill C from being Elected, did it?
Bill
It's my Sig and you can't have it. Mine! All Mine!
you can search google using test.google.com even if you are infected with the trojan.
About a month ago Google also started redirecting every URL on its search pages through its own site, so they know what you actually click on in the search results too.
i think i would pay for google , if they cached and googleized my previous searches ..
one example of this would be... if i searched for 'java api string' it would only show me url's that i had selected in a previous query..
most of times i can not be bothered to add another bookmark , and google is so fast and accurate that i feel it it faster then looking through my bookmarks
.. I do feel guilty about wasting their and my employers bandwidth because im to lazy to boorkmark a site...
-greg
your thumb prints are on the paintwork -- mark e. smith
The counter is cookie based. Cookies are simple text files on the users's machines. You can simply open these cookies in notepad and fill in any number you like :)
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
...but no content yet.
Google Watch Watch Watch
I was starting to wonder if slashdot editors were being instructed to filter out links to NYTimes via partner (no reg req) links because no one ever used them. I guess it was just lazy submitters.
Big thanks to the original poster.
In this climate? Please. He'd pin it on 'evil hackers', promise to spearhead a few bills further restricting the rights of American citizens, and see a minor uptick in the polls. He certainly wouldn't lose a moment's sleep over it.
this is a sig.
The candidate declined from any comments, but his political carreer seems to be over for good.
This is why centralization of information is always a mixed blessing. Journalists are always trying to dig up whatever superfluous dirt they can on canidates they don't agree with (journalism is a joke, BTW), so their job is only easier if they can pay off a single person at Google, Equifax, IRS, etc. for as much data as they want. It's one-stop shopping for political ruin and can very easily destroy a representative democracy by furthering the false moral superiority often projected onto our leaders by people who agree with their agendas. Basically, it is a good argument for privacy, where every person can and should have an opportunity to run for public office without fearing that people will judge them based on trivial purchases or actions from years ago.
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
Sorry, I meant to down mod mnmlst's first post, #7142339 down (seemed a bit trollish) but this one (#7143568) up (you recanted). But I miscounted my mod points, and ended up only giving the bad mod the first posting, and not a better one to the second. (Hence this post, to cancel it all out for you.)
--== [N] ==--
That IS funny, but it also reflects one of the approaches our US government is currently taking in its quest for full information dominance. By making people feel included by various approaches to monitoring and left out by not participating, the government encourages people to submit themselves to informational dominance, lest they be ignored and left behind. This is described in more detail in NSA Psy-Op training doclet PSO-3884002 (offline, go to your local library if interested) "Social Engineering for Informational Acquiescence".
Maybe soon they will start to charge us...woohoo.
Why does the Internet public view Google as a "good" company? How did they develop that distinction? What makes them good?
penis enlargement abc's
What they offer they offer the best of, and for free (google, blogger, all the google features that could be considered seperate ventures)
If I wore a hat, I wouldn't mind a salute to the model they're following. Go google!!!
Many Thanks,
Luke