Subj : Re: Community
To   : Spectre
From : tenser
Date : Tue Oct 04 2022 09:12:10

On 03 Oct 2022 at 10:47a, Spectre pondered and said...
 
 Sp>  te> Search is a hard problem and requires vast capital resources to
 Sp>  te> address in a meaningful way.  Most of the web is still outside of the
 Sp>  te> walled gardens of Facebook et al, and indexing it is not easy, let
 Sp>  te> alone making the search corpus available to people.
 Sp> 
 Sp> I'm at times left to wonder, how much data Google Search actually
 Sp> maintains about the individuals using it.  I've found frequently if I
 Sp> swap search engines I cannot get anything remotely like the information
 Sp> I'm looking for while getting all sorts of extraneous junk.  While if I
 Sp> go back to the Google Empire I'll generally get a better result. 
 Sp> Usually I'm not looking for anything thats on any other major service
 Sp> like FacePalm or similar.

If you go to your Google account, you can download everything
they know about you and all of your data that they're holding
onto via the "Takeout" service (or whatever they're calling it
these days).  I can say that user data is encrypted at rest
and that if you delete it, it is fully purged from Google's
servers (including backups) in something like 30 days.

 Sp>  te> In some sense, Google benefited enormously because, when it started
 Sp>  te> out, the web was much, much smaller and so it could grow _with_
 Sp>  te> the web.  Not so much these days.
 Sp> 
 Sp> They were also able to keep moving with the times... where a lot of
 Sp> others fell by the wayside.  Way back when I used to prefer WebCrawler,
 Sp> with Alta Vista as a backup position, but it got to the point you
 Sp> couldn't get anything reasonable out of them.

Yup.  That's exactly right.

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