back to article Google: Our rapid load won't give you anything nasty

Google has downplayed concerns that refinements to its search technology could leave surfers more exposed to search engine manipulation attacks. Google Inside Search aims to speed up web searches by pre-loading content from remote sites. The so-called Instant Pages technology only works with Google Chrome. Miscreants often …

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  1. Thomas 18
    Thumb Down

    "Sites marked as potentially harmful by our Safe Browsing technology..."

    Blacklisting hardly constitutes "no additional risk"

    How about you only load the pictures or alternatively only load content from sites the user has white listed. Now that is getting closer to "no additional risk"

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    "Sites marked as potentially harmful by our Safe Browsing technology"

    If Google means the same piece of junk that was letting all the recent trojans through, this will work so well...

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Excuse me??

    "Our rapid load won't give you anything nasty"

    Am I on the right site? ;)

    1. Elmer Phud
      Pint

      It's Friday

      as title

    2. Asgard
      Joke

      pre-loading

      @Jim Booth, "Our rapid load won't give you anything nasty"

      Just don't Google for it, otherwise Google will be pre-loading the content for you, for the rest of your life. :)

      It'll also make for some interesting conversations with your other half. :) ... such as, "uummmm, why is Google pre-loading this content for you?!"

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Just another reason...

    ...to stop using Google.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      RE: Just another reason...

      ...and what are you going to use instead? Bing? Yahoo search?

      I'm laughing already.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Laugh away sheep boy

        I don't use Google because it's results are actually pretty shitty. Great if you're shopping, but pretty hopeless if you're actually looking for useful information.

        There's that old chestnut of typing in an exact search phrase and not finding that precise phrase on your Google results until page three. Google like to claim that they're being helpful, that their clever algorithms know better what you're looking for than you do. NO THEY DON'T. Honestly I typed in a filename earlier and Google didn't find a page that referred to it until the twelfth result. What's that about? What were the 11 entries before it actually for?

        But one really good example of how stupid Google can get is to do the same search from two completely different public IP addresses (not two PCs in the same office) at the same time, you get two different sets of results. Quite apart from the fact that it call's Google's accuracy into question if they can't give two people the same results to the same search it shows up how inefficient their systems are. Why aren't all the front end servers querying the same back end data? Got a website or two? Take a look at your logs. Here comes a Google bot hoovering up your whole site and then ten minutes later here comes another doing the same, and then another, and another. Why? Run a little minority interest site and the majority of your traffic is probably all those stupid Google search bots. Why can't they just do it once?

        I really wouldn't trust them to code something as simple as a web forum so I'm certainly not going to trust them with anything at all complex.

  5. M Gale
    Trollface

    If all it does is HTML..

    ...then fine.

    If it even thinks of allowing Javascript or Flash into the mix, including inline things like onload="javascript:lulzYouGotTheHack();", then there's no way Google can claim "no additional risk".

    Mind you, it could be a funny way of launching a browser forkbomb or GNAA's Last Measure or similar. Nimping people who just type in a search term? Oh Google, I like this idea already!

  6. nichomach
    Devil

    Another reason...

    ....to never, ever, evererverever use Chrome, then...

    Spawn, since there's still no evil SergeyLarryEric...

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Down

    Google going down the wrong road

    Is it me or is Google search going down the toilet? Already, Instant Search combined with auto-complete has been a nightmare since it was introduced. It actually slows down my searches due to an independent search over the network for each letter and it cannot be reliably disabled from Google Preferences. Also, it interferes with other preference settings such as number of search results per page.

    I have had to resort to encrypted.google.com which does not have instant search or use the tiny browser search window. Both of which break what feels like a habit of a lifetime.

    Now this pre-fetching technology is going to rely on Google's security model and their browser's security settings to do the Right Thing (TM). I assume even Chrome Extensions have no control on pre-fetching so greatly reducing the usefulness of something like a NoScript security extension.

    Way to ruin your own brand ... At this rate, Bing is going to see a rapid rise in users while others shift to custom search interfaces such as Blackle and Scroogle.

    1. DZ-Jay

      How to disable it

      Block JavaScript execution on Google's site, and Bob's your uncle.

      Das ist alles.

      -dZ.

    2. doperative
      Boffin

      how to disable Instant Search ..

      > Is it me or is Google search going down the toilet? Already, Instant Search combined with auto-complete has been a nightmare since it was introduced.

      "you can opt out by accessing your search settings under the gear icon on any search results page"

      http://www.google.com/support/websearch/bin/static.py?hl=en&page=guide.cs&guide=1186810&answer=186610&rd=1

      Switch off auto-complete

      http://www.google.com/m

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        @doperative

        And when you clear your cookies?

        Some people clear them every time they close the browser

    3. sabroni Silver badge
      Unhappy

      try using bing..

      ... I did. I hate to say it but Google search is loads better. I try and avoid Google 'cos they're so evil, obv., but if I've got something I need to find for work then Google gets results where bing turns up nothing or relevance. (Last time I tried switching to bing it was returning empty pages for any search with asp in it! Irony!). Till Bing search gets better Google aren't really in danger, no matter how awful the interface is....

      1. The Fuzzy Wotnot
        Pint

        Use Scroogle!

        Use Scroogle, they issue queries and scrape the Google engine. They can always use a couple of quid in donations to help keep their servers going too.

      2. h4rm0ny

        Re: try using Bing

        I did. And actually I still do use Bing. It's partly out a tendency to just support the underdog, but I prefer the look of Bing actually, I like the way it handles image results and the preview options of search results are sometimes actually useful. You say Bing "turns up nothing or relevance". Apart from the ASP bug which you mentioned, I'd challenge you to come up with any realistic search term that doesn't produce more or less the same results as Google. The only time I switch back to Google is when I want to search newsgroups, which Bing doesn't seem to do.

        Now what I would like to see is none of this pre-fetching nonsense (particularly if those pre-fetched sites are allowed to set cookies which I presume they are). Instead, I want to see the ability to filter results by publication time. If I could search for news stories for example, and click "updated in the last X days", this would be a hundred times more useful than any supposed speed up from this rapid load thing.

        1. Michael Chester

          Filter by date:

          You can do this already (to a point)

          Advanced search -> date -> past 24h, week or month (not complete choice, but generally good enough)

        2. Ratman99UK

          updated in the last X days

          Google lets you search for pages updated in the past X.

          on Google homepage

          click "advanced search"

          click "Date, usage rights, numeric range, and more" (at bottom)

          and its labeled "Date: (how recent the page is)"

          there is only a few options but it works well for news stories and alike.

          Ratman99UK

        3. sabroni Silver badge

          @h4m0ny

          >>I'd challenge you to come up with any realistic search term that doesn't produce more or less the same results as Google<<

          didn't go looking on purpose, but just found this. Searched for "What is TPop?" in google and bing. Google, first entry, explains what TPop is (Taiwanese pop music). Bing doesn't have the foggiest, thinks I'm asking "What is Top?".

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Devil

    Follow the money

    when someone says something like this:

    "We've thought hard about this issue, and we don't believe there is any additional risk to users," a Google spokesman explained.

    you have to wonder exactly who gets paid, where and when and what their motivation is to issue such a sweeping denial (and how they're going to spin it when the technique gets pwnd)

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Gimp

    only works with Google Chrome.

    No need to read on then.

    --- sent from my Firefox, using, err... Firefox.

  10. /dev/me
    Facepalm

    only works with Google Chrome

    A. This site is best viewed in Netscape Navigator.

    B. This site is best viewed in Internet Explorer.

    C. This feature only works in Google Chrome.

    D. Click here to install the Silverlight-plugin.

    E. The web is based on Open Standards.

    Which doesn't belong?

  11. Anonymous Coward
    Mushroom

    How Flash^WWWWancy ...

    Been thinking how daft the idea was. How exploitable it is. And these comments about only downloading images brings up another question.

    What are they planning to do with all those fancy new sites that *require* swf or js applications to execute just to view the page graphic?

  12. Anonymous Coward
    Paris Hilton

    Infinite Loop

    Could I search for "google.com/?google.com" which would then return google.com as the 1st response, which would then return "google.com" as the first response which would then crash the internet? Or have they thought long and hard about that too?

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