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Comment by marginalia_nu | Hacker News Reader

Everything you type in your URL bar in Chrome and Firefox is sent to Google.

At least in Firefox you can disable that (or redirect where its sent) by disabling search suggestions in the search field.

There is also a section in the Privacy and security section for the firefox suggest feature specifically. [1]

I could be wrong but I thought those were also piped to the default search provider. I havent fired up wireshark to test though either.

[1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/search-suggestions-fire...

does search suggestions always go to google, or to your selected search provider?

I was under the impression that Firefox uses your selected search provider for this feature.

I believe it uses your selected provider. I looked in about:config and saw no URLs when searching for things like "search", "Suggestions" etc.

really the only way to be sure is to fire up wireshark. But I am on a work computer with a TON of crap running that is quite chatty. So i didnt look to verify.

But even on my browser I see this: https://imgur.com/a/odiHIzy

That said, my search provider is Kagi and I also dont see my search quota increment even with search suggestions enabled....

You can turn it off in Chrome too......

> At least in Firefox you can disable that

As long as you're doing that you might as well go all out and work through the ever-growing list of "features" that generate outbound connections you never explicitly requested, but which Firefox makes anyway.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-stop-firefox-making...

Thanks!

And in case anyone doesn't know why, it's so autocomplete works.

...which is pretty funny, since I'd assume that if I begin typing an url, I'd assume it would primarily search and use my local browsing history. But no, it gives more weight to sending me to a google search, presumably so google has the chance to show some ads to me. User-hostile design, not happy with it.

The address bar is a search box. All of my Google queries go through it. So of course I want it to autocomplete Google search results, not just my local history. Fortunately it does both and gets the balance pretty right. It's 100% user-friendly design for me, satisfied customer over here.

I mean most people I know google "gmail" instead of typing "gmail.com" but I cannot see how this is an argument for being considered primarily a search box and not autocompleting "gmail.com", if anything kind of the opposite and all this is ridiculous.

I get really annoyed, when the Firefox Home with the search input redirects my typing to the address bar.

History matches are regularly at the top of suggestions for me.

If you're using Firefox the keyword for controlling that is 'frecency'. Adjusting the values there in about:config will let you boost history and bookmarks.

This is why I use firefox, you can just un-check 'show search suggestions ahead of browser history in addressbar results'

By default yes.

My search suggestions are disabled and I exclusively use keyword searching like g, y, ddg, da, ...

Firefox - not really. One of the very first changes done to firefox on installation - the URL bar is that: a URL and the search one is enabled by ctrl+k (instead of ctrl+L), and the default search engine has long be changed not to be google.

What if we don't use google as our default search engine, is it still shared?

No, it's only shared with the provider you choose (e.g. if your default search engine is DDG, then the search terms are shared with DDG, etc.)

That's a different issue from what is described here.

https://imgur.com/a/p4CVBHb

"Power and privacy to the people. No need to dig into your security settings. Fierce privacy is our default."

- Firefox on a recent update. You know, a browser that defaults to Google search and having search suggestions on.

I know I'd have a couple privacy settings to change.

Does it relate you (as a person) to that data though? I believed that was anonymous.

Is this true if you aren’t using Google as your search engine?

No. Atleast not on Firefox. I think? idk lol

The hashed form of the URL might still reach Google as part of the Safe Browsing initiative, although a copy of the List of Naughty Websites is kept locally as well, so if you visit a known deceptive site, it need not ping their servers.

No. It's just that Firefox adverstises itself as private:

https://imgur.com/a/p4CVBHb "Power and privacy to the people. No need to dig into your security settings. Fierce privacy is our default."

but has Google as the default search engine and defaults to having search suggestions on.

Yeah, but do they index those URLs and include them in search results?

(My experience over 20+ years: no, they don't.)

IIRC Firefox asks you about it on first use.

There's also the "safe browsing" scam in which every URL is looked up in a list from google to check that it hasn't been deemed "unsafe".

That uses a hashed URL

Even better, it’s a partial hash that gets sent.

Thankfully nobody could ever guess what a hash of something like "facebook.com" might look like

Yeah, I don't believe that. Even if it did google still has a list of "every" url it can hash and map in order to spy on you.

I'm not sure they'd need to reverse the URL.

Because of how profiling algorithms work, you could just as easily profile someone based on hashes alone. The URL doesn't matter.

Basically this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federated_Learning_of_Cohorts

That's just a local list if I remember correctly.

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