Google Secretly Tracking the News
I love google news. It makes getting all the latest news really easy as it aggregates all the latest information together on one page. Google however, is very slyly tracking what news interests people. On the whole I see nothing wrong with it, however it is done in such a hidden manner.
When you go to google news, mouse over any of the links to a news article, and have a look at what the hyperlink appears as in your status bar…
Nothing wrong with that. It appears the article links directly to the news website. Herein lies the problem. The link however does no go to that location. Press your mouse button down on the link, but don’t release. You activate a section of mouse down javascript that causes the page to change the link. Normally this happens so fast when you click and release that you don’t notice.
The new URL effectively allows google to monitor what you are reading, it may help them personalise news, but in my opinion it’s done in a way to sneaky way.
dan said,
November 22, 2005 at 8:56 pm
i have come to the conclusion that google sucks, other than websearching… one of thier progs almost melted my cpu
@uni said,
November 22, 2005 at 10:22 pm
what program dan?
Jay Freeman (saurik) said,
November 23, 2005 at 6:55 am
So while I agree that it’s kind of sneaky, and while I don’t neccessarily agree with the practice of tracking such information in general, I also want to say that it solves the #1 technical problem I have with most “modify the URL to track clicks” schemes: it defeats the “visited link” feature of my web browser. This method of modifying the link as I click it allows my browser to recognize these urls as places I’ve already been, but still allow Google to get the information.
dan said,
November 23, 2005 at 6:29 pm
uni, it was one of those research ones, i thought i could make a small charity to google, im getting rid of it
alex said,
December 7, 2005 at 11:31 pm
Jay wtf are u taljking about… u think anyone has any idea as to what the fuck ur talking about…
alex said,
December 7, 2005 at 11:34 pm
and whoever made this news item uses styleXP… probably a cracked version (like i do) :D
Chris Nolan.ca said,
December 8, 2005 at 2:47 am
Grab the ‘Customize Google’ extension for firefox and you can disable the javascript that gets injected in to track. They do it on the search results too :-( http://chrisnolan.ca/archive/ID/599 for more info.