Note the caniuse link says "While still in the WHATWG specification, this feature was removed from the W3C HTML5 specification in 2010." Another reason I prefer Firefox. Why implement a rejected non-standard feature whose primary purpose is to enable surveillance?
Seems like it's not meant to enable tracking so much as to improve its performance and UX, as the article demonstrates. (Google tracks clicks from Firefox users just fine without ping, it just does it in a more annoying way.)
Also probably worth noting that the W3C doesn't maintain an HTML standard anymore[1]; the WHATWG standard is the definitive one.
The fact that google made some aspect of their website behave better in chrome than in firefox is not really an argument that firefox is doing it wrong so much as yet another example of browser wars 2.0
> Why implement a rejected non-standard feature whose primary purpose is to enable surveillance?
Something that's in the spec that matters (WHATWG) but not the one that desperately pretends to still have relevance for HTML though it hasn't since it tried to push XHTML 2 (W3C) isn't “rejected” or “nonstandard” in any meaningful sense.
How that came to be is an interesting study in company PR. MSFT arguably should've had a much more prominent advisory position in WHATWG than Google but WHATWG ended up solidifying in a large part to counter act all the non-standard behavior folks experienced trying to develop cross browser pages in the days when mentioning ie6 would cause a terrified silence to fall on any web dev department.
Why do you call this surveillance? You just voluntarily entered your search terms. Why shouldn't Google know which link you clicked? The main purpose of this information is to improve the service that you are using.
Because you have an option of not using Google at all. I think if you are providing a free service, you are at least entitled to know how the users use it.
Because it is surveillance. There’s plenty of surveillance examples with multiple uses and “improving the service” doesn’t blanketedly discount their other uses.
More importantly they make it a pain in the ass to copy the actual URL of a link without actually clicking it. If you right click a search result link then their JS edits the href to the Google tracking link. So you can’t actually examine the entire URL without risking opening it up and being tracked. At best you get whatever preview your browser shows on hover.
Definition of surveillance: close watch kept over someone or something (as by a detective)
Counting the clicks on the search results page is nowhere near. A cashier in the supermarket knows which items you are buying, it doesn't mean that you are under surveillance.
And most of all, if you are worried about surveillance by Google, why use them at all?
Google search is good because it tracks what links people click and knows when they come back to go to a different url on the page. if 99% of people visit the top result for a query, return, then hit the second one, chances are that the top result never answers what the search query asks.
People here may not like to read "Google" and "good" together, but yours is a description of how things actually work.
Of all the tracking Google does, this is by far the most justified, and least concerning to me. I'd rather log out and search anonymously, if my concern was being put in a bubble, rather than block this kind of feedback for search result quality. Then, again, I primarily use DuckDuckGo and I wonder if they do anything similar.
> Google search might have been good over a decade ago but today it's trash.
IME, its still consistently far and away better than the alternatives. Part of the difference in perception of quality may be that over time it has come to use more personal signals to zero in on relevant results, and the people that complain about how bad it is overlap considerably with those who actively seek to deny those signals to Google.
> over time it has come to use more personal signals to zero in on relevant results
I am specifically disinterested in existing within an echo chamber.
When I search for a topic, I am looking for information that is most faithful to objective reality. A detailed explanation of the limits of our current understanding, or why my understanding / model is inadequate is orders of magnitude more valuable to me than something that will affirm that I am a smart, special person. Google used to be exceptionally capable of delivering those kinds of results, even if it took some work refining search terms. Over the preceding decade, their effectiveness in this regard has significantly diminished.
good point, that seems plausible. It's an unenviable choice though: good results from incessant surveillance (and nasty link re-writing per topic), or poor results if you use it infrequently.
[I wouldn't know. I've been using DDG for so long now, I can't remember the last time I used Google search. Maybe I've forgotten how much better G is. Truth is, though, DDG does what I need of it. Rarely come away without the answer I want. So no temptation to use Google. At. All.]
I still have the habit of adding !g into my queries when the results are bad.
There have been years since the last time I remember Google actually giving me better results than DDG (except when I only want product sellers, on this case there has been around an year).
Yes, maybe if I let Google see even more of my life, they would be able to get me better results. But they have access to much more than I'm comfortable with already, and the results aren't there.
The first page of "search results" is usually filled with ads and Google scraping and special casing dozens of sites. It is almost at a point where I have to skip to the "second" page just to get to the actual search results.
Also Google broke a lot of search qualifiers for stupid reasons, like the '+' when they created Google+.
Occasionally I accidentally use Google search when I've got an automated Chrome window open, and I find it astounding how unhelpful the results are. Everything that is returns is clearly optimized for what Google thinks readers want in a webpage rather than what actually matches my query. DDG isn't perfect but I find it better respects my queries.
IC part numbers. Service manuals for various equipment (now all you get are sites which may or may not have one, but are willing to collect your $$$). Error codes (filled with pages of results for a different code).
