Reactive prefetch on Google Search: 100-150ms speedup

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.

Search is one of these. In order for search to work, the user has to send a query to a third party. The third party has to be able to read the query to do the search. If that's not an acceptable loss of privacy, then don't use search.

This is exactly what I was talking about: the misunderstanding is thinking that your outrage changes the privacy situation in any way. The options on offer are “Stop using Google” or “Let Google collect data about the search results you click on”; redirect scripts, <a ping> and Beacon are all simply implementation details for the latter option.

If you feel strongly about this contact your politicians and lobby for privacy laws restricting the data companies are allowed to collect. There's approximately zero chance that everyone will voluntarily stop measuring how well their search ranking algorithms work.

As others have said, there is no way to prevent Google from gathering this information, so adding the capability to a browser doesn't change the situation.

For example, Microsoft performed a technique known as tying.

But even the claim was not simply "they shipped IE with Windows 98" , or that they introduced other product features to work well with IE first, but "they made IE deliberately difficult to remove, and deliberately and intentfully made it harder for netscape navigator to work". This is not the same as "we made IE the best, and did nothing to competitive products". In particular, it is not the fact that they introduced stuff to IE first, it is the fact that they deliberately harmed the other products.

See paragraphs 94, 95, and 96 on http://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/F3/253/...

Even then, the court held the tying should be analyzed deferentially, and that the US would have to prove this had actual anticompetitive effect.

See in particular, the court's admonition at 93

"As a general rule, courts are properly very skeptical about claims that competition has been harmed by a dominant firm's product design changes. See, e.g., Foremost Pro Color, Inc. v. Eastman Kodak Co., 703 F.2d 534, 544-45 (9th Cir. 1983). In a competitive market, firms routinely innovate in the hope of appealing to consumers, sometimes in the process making their products incompatible with those of rivals; the imposition of liability when a monopolist does the same thing will inevitably deter a certain amount of innovation. This is all the more true in a market, such as this one, in which the product itself is rapidly changing. See Findings of Fact p 59. Judicial deference to product innovation, however, does not mean that a monopolist's product design decisions are per se lawful. See Foremost Pro Color, 703 F.2d at 545; see also Cal. Computer Prods., 613 F.2d at 739, 744; In re IBM Peripheral EDP Devices Antitrust Litig., 481 F. Supp. 965, 1007-08 (N.D. Cal. 1979)."

Note that these are also tying between sold products and given away products, not just given away products. Otherwise, open source linux distributions with large market share would have tying issues (and in fact, they've been unsuccessfully sued for illegal competition before)