As for me, I think once a site has seen my exact search term, knowing which of the results I'm clicking on is a small leak and quite useful so that the popular results can be put at the top.
* Wikipedia (smartphone, PC): Aard Dict[1]
* Translation apps (smartphone)
* OpenStreetMap (smartphone): OsmAnd[2]
[1]: http://aarddict.org [2]: http://osmand.net
Only because people have "forgotten" how to build offline apps.
* it's nice to have knowledge at hand when offline (commuting via train, abroad w/o a local data plan, no gsm coverage, edge connection instead of 4G)
* saves bandwidth for my 1GB/month data plan when appropriate
* Aard dict can be used to evade filtering (not my primary concern, but there are people in other countries who might benefit)
Not everything is black or white.
Given two solutions with equal potential for abuse, why not pick the technically superior solution?
Straw man. You're presupposing the existence of 'ping'. The argument is why, given an observation that web features X and Y are being used to implement contentious function Z, would you want to implement a brand new, even more insidious, web feature, designed solely for doing Z, in the first place? Technical superiority of the new implementation of Z is not in dispute.
> they already know which you click on.
I'm pretty confident that they don't in my case.
Would you mind sharing the details of how you achieve this?
I think in this case it's pretty black or white, because people would ordinarily take the time to add to their search queries. If people want to see results on (whatever fetish), do you think they would just Google the word 'sex' and then go from there, under cover that they might have just been looking up the Latin word for 6 they saw in some inscription? (Whoops, also better load the first 9,700,000 results pages in javascript, which is what I estimate you have to read through to get to something that mentions this without adding the word 'latin'). Wouldn't want to give away which page of results the user stopped on.
I mean if they want 'suicide help in Detroit' would they just Google the word suicide?
Not everything is black or white, but for Google to know what the BEST result is for 'suicide help in Detroit' is pretty black and white: they already have the query, and yes, they should know which link is clicked on the most. If it was originally on the second page through their algorithm but gets 90% of the clicks when they put it on the first page, yes, they should absolutely know and use this information. In fact (because it had been on the second page in this example) it might save lives!
there really is no trade-off or drawback. it's like the server in a restaurant asking you if you enjoyed your meal, and using this as part of recommendations the next someone someone asks what's popular.
"Well, you know what I ordered, but damned if I'll let you know what part of it I liked. That's just too personal."
reads to me that way anyway.
...and then being able to get you fired, steal your identity, or otherwise affect your life without your knowledge because you happen to enjoy a certain kind of food your boss doesn't like.
The metaphor is spot-on. "Did you enjoy your meal"? "Oh so you can get me fired, steal my identity, or otherwise affect my life without my knowledge because I happen to enjoy a certain kind of food my boss doesn't like? No comment."
The reason it's a good analogy is because you already 'ordered' (the search terms are the meaningful data) and a statistical sampling of which of the top 10 results for "octopus hentai videos" a random sampling of users who entered that search term clicked on, is not in practice used for anything other than improving ranking quality.
it's exactly the same as "did you enjoy your meal" or what you liked about it - you've already given up most of the info by ordering in the first place.
so your analogy is a good one. it's just completely innocent.