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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?
My ISP (internet express in regional NSW, australia) receently entered into a contract with MSN to supply search services and with altavista and google search pages only the MSN one comes up instead
/etc/hosts but who wants to do that all the time?
I do get to google through a numeric address set in
We really get ripped off out here there are no big ISP options in country australia
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.
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
I'm hearing this 'virus' placed entries in the windows hosts file so that Google points to something else.
For XP the host file can be found here:
\Windows\System32\Drivers\etc\hosts
for 2000 and NT:
\Winnt\System32\Drivers\etc\hosts
and for the other Windows systems:
\Windows\hosts
Check out the entries in the hosts file and make sure there's nothing strange in it
-- Sib
Google is one of the few online tools I would consider paying for. If the paid-for version didn't include any ads/sponsored-placements at all, I'd probably do it.
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
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.
My ISP (internet express in regional NSW, australia) receently entered into a contract with MSN to supply search services and with altavista and google search pages only the MSN one comes up instead
Which ISP, pray tell?
If this is true, then given its illegaility, I would be contacting my friends at the ACCC over this.
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
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.
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.
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
It says Chinese (Traditional) in traditional chinese.
Don't mind me, I'm just carping the diem...
Not sure what it says, but it's the Taiwan Google's logo.
The position of the characters is usually where the country name is. Also, the mainland China Google logo is the same as the Taiwanese except for the characters in parenthesees.
So, I'm betting that it says "China (Republic)", "China (Taiwan)", "China (Taipei)", or something like that, while the mainland Chinese one says "China (People's Republic)", "China (Mainland)", or the like.
It says that if you are running Windows then you should probabably check your hosts file for an entry that redirects Google to another IP. If said file does contain such an entry then it *also* says you need to patch your system because you've been trojaned.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
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!"
If I caught my wife going through my sock drawer I'd say, "Ummmm, looking for something in particular?"
If I caught the FBI going through my sock drawer I'd call my lawyer.
KFG
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.
Google Karma: Terrific, due to obsessive searching syndrome
You could also ask why the world is so concerned about Iraq having Weapons of Mass Destruction when the US undoubtably has far greater Weapons of Mass Destruction at their disposal.
It's not just a matter of who has what, it's about which company has shown more respect for the concerns of their customers and in this case that is Google.
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
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.
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
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?
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Problems that go away by themselves
also reappear by themselves
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I find it quite more likely that they would store an ID number in the cookie and store the actual tracking information on their side than store all the data in a cookie. Besides, it makes more sense for them to keep information which is potentially useful for them safe on their side rather than wild in your cookie file.
I also occasionally surf using telnet to port 80, but I find surfing with WGET to be the most soul-satisfying experience.
Thomas Dz.
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 :)
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.