Internet companies make money from the data of their users; knowledge of our preferences allows them to show us the most relevant advertising. Every user action on the Internet is tracked. . Now we have figured out what useful things can be extracted from the database collected by Google.

How does Google collect information?

The origins of the creation of the search engine google.com were a scientific project of Stanford students Larry Page and Sergey Brin. In March 1996, they launched their first search robot, and on September 15, 1997, they registered the domain www.google.com. The company was officially founded on September 4, 1998, and in October 2015, Google Inc. reorganized into the international conglomerate Alphabet Inc. In less than 20 years, the holding’s technological products were not used only by those who had never accessed the Internet. Now the company has more than a hundred different services, programs and applications, which represent an entire ecosystem.

All information is linked to your Gmail account. The principle is quite simple: applications and services provide more features or do not work at all without authorization, and upon first launch they ask for permission to collect personal data to improve the operation of the algorithms. Surveillance can be disabled by sacrificing some convenience (sometimes without loss at all), but, as practice shows, almost no one reads the license agreement. Your mobile phone tells the most about you, especially on the Android platform.

First of all, the company collects data to sell more personalized advertising. Also, collecting information about the operation of applications helps speed up and improve their functionality. Each user becomes an almost free tester, and this significantly reduces the final cost of the product.

What does Google know about you?

Google may know more about its users than their close friends. In addition, the “good corporation” stores information that you have long forgotten.

Here is a partial list of user data stored by Google: name; floor; birthday; personal numbers and contacts; search queries and surfing the Internet; preferences and hobbies; movement in the real world, including favorite places, place of work, what route you take to get there and what transport you use; in some cases, the system has a recording of your voice and even the ability to identify you from a photo.

In the Google account settings, all information is distributed in three main sections "Security and Entry", "Confidentiality" And "Account settings".

Find the lost, limit the suspicious

In chapter "Security and Entry" Can strengthen security your account; change your password and add a backup email; according to the prompts step by step find lost phone, on which your account is used, and if the device is on the Android platform, you can block it and write a message to the finder.

Be sure to check on which devices, at what time and even in what place your account is used, as well as suspicious activities. If you notice anything strange, you should immediately change your password, and for reliability you can add two-step authentication;

At the very bottom of the section security there is a switch that is responsible for automatically blocking untrusted applications; you can also perform a manual audit in the subsection "Applications that have access to the account". If you click on any applications in the list that appears, you will see detailed information about what privileges the program has. It’s worth taking a closer look at the list and disabling what you haven’t used for a long time or don’t trust.

Google knows where you were last summer

Confidential section- a real find for a spy. To get started, in a couple of clicks you can rewrite personal information.

All contacts from mail and applications, as well as phone numbers from synchronized devices are located in the corresponding tab. In the “More” section of the side menu, you can make a copy or, conversely, download new contacts from the archive and other services, and the tab just above will show who you often communicate with.

Then it is useful to look into the settings tracking your activities. You can prohibit or, conversely, allow the collection of information from devices, the transfer of search history, locations, voice control and YouTube views. Each item has a short description, and the decision is made in one click on the slider on the right.

In a separate window you can see the history of your actions: search queries, including voice queries, videos watched and sites visited. The search bar has a built-in filtering function by service name, topic and date. Using the same criteria, you can clear your history by clicking on the three dots in the upper right corner of each block or using a special history deletion tab.

Timeline in Google Maps shows the places you have visited. You can see when you were there by double-clicking on the mark. Also, in the menu located in the upper left corner, you can select a day, month, year to view your route for that day, but not earlier than when you were this function is enabled. Every year the service improves: the later the chronology, there is more and more accurate information in it, right down to the transport you used. If necessary, each entry can be deleted by clicking on the trash can icon.

myaccount.google.com

There is no separate link to Google Photos settings in the menu, although Android devices usually have the program by default. If desired, it can also be installed on Apple products. Many users do not notice that the application, synchronizing with a Google account, stores photos online. Only the account owner has access to them, but in the settings you can create shared albums. The quality of the saved photos is also selected there. The original one takes up Google Drive space, while the compressed one has no restrictions. In the settings, you can give permission to group photos with similar faces, this will make it possible to link a person’s photos to his contact.

The service itself is quite convenient, it allows you to find photos by date, location, or you can simply enter what you are looking for in the search bar. If you want to delete everything from Google servers, be sure to disable synchronization in the application on your devices so that photos do not disappear from them.

Screenshot photos.google.com

What are they advertising to you and why?

Advertising preferences collected based on your gender, age and interests. If the list of interesting topics includes something that you are not interested in or do not like, then each of the items can be rewritten or blocked at your discretion.

If you deactivate the switch in the right corner of the top panel, personalized advertising in Google partner networks will be disabled, and using the link at the bottom of the page - on third party services.

Users are given the right to install a plugin from Google in their browser; it will block ad personalization, even if it is enabled in their account settings: for Chrome, Mozila Firefox and Internet Explorer.

It is worth remembering that in both cases advertising will not disappear anywhere: it will be less relevant; Some ads cannot be blocked or muted; most often the ads will be based on the content of the open web page.

There are applications that completely block ads in the browser, but then the sites you visit will stop making money.

How to delete and back up all your data

In the depths of the privacy settings there is a transition to your personal account. It provides a list of main services and their contents. Each tile is clickable; when clicked, it displays detailed information, and in the right corner of the drop-down list, an ellipsis will open an additional menu, which for some services allows you to download all the information or delete it.

To download everything that Google stores about you in a few clicks, you need to go to the export menu. In it you can select the services you need, or just click next, and then an additional menu will appear. In it you can select the archive format (including splitting the archive into several parts), as well as a service or download link. An old account can collect tens or even hundreds of gigabytes of data. Therefore, it takes from a couple of hours to several days to create an archive. When it is ready, the system will notify you by email.

Screenshot takeout.google.com

The data deletion menu is divided into deleting accounts in services YouTube, Google+, Play Games and Gmail. The user also has the option total destruction In chapter "Account settings", where you will be asked twice for confirmation, since a complete wipe will affect many useful services associated with the account. For example, online banking can be linked to Gmail. Just in case, you can leave a recovery path by adding a backup email and phone number in the appropriate columns.

For emergencies, if something happens and you won't use your account for a long time, choose a friend or relative who will have access to your data. In the menu you need to select the period of inactivity (from 3 to 18 months), a list of data and the person who will receive it. After the specified period, the account will be blocked, and the trusted person will receive an SMS message with access to the mail. You can also specify that everything be destroyed automatically 3 months after deactivation.

Globally, Google is the best search engine. It’s not for nothing that it is the most popular search engine and owns almost 70% of the global search engine market.

Google is a corruption of the English word "googol", coined by Milton Sirotta, nephew of the American mathematician Edward Kaiser, to denote the number consisting of one and one hundred zeros. Now the name Google is the leader of Internet search engines, developed by Google Inc.

Google occupies more than 70% of the global market, which means that seven out of ten people online turn to its page when searching for information on the Internet. It currently registers about 50 million search queries daily and indexes more than 8 billion web pages. Google can find information in 101 languages. Google at the end of August 2004 consisted of 132 thousand machines located in different parts of the planet.

Google uses intelligent text analysis techniques to find important yet relevant pages for your query. To do this, Google analyzes not only the page itself that matches the query, but also the pages that link to it to determine the value of that page for the purposes of your query. Google also prefers pages where the keywords you enter are close to each other.

The Google interface contains a rather complex query language that allows you to limit the search scope to specific domains, languages, file types, etc. The use of some operators in this language allows you to make the process of finding the necessary information more flexible and accurate. Let's look at some of them.

- Google is case insensitive, i.e. The search results for “RaznobLog” and “RazNobLog” will be the same.
— The search operator register is IMPORTANT! Those. search results for “beer OR vodka” and “beer or vodka” will be different.
— Google excludes linking words like “and, a, but, or, I, a, the...”

Now let’s talk about how to make searching for information on Google faster and more efficient.

1. Exclusion from Google search
To exclude any word, phrase, symbol, etc. from search results, just put a “-” (minus) sign in front of it, and it will not appear in the search results.
For example, I entered the following phrase into the search bar: “free hosting - ru” and in the search results there is not a single.ru site, except for paid advertisements.

2. Search by synonyms
Use the “~” symbol to search for similar words to the selected one. For example, as a result of the expression: “~best movies are the best,” you will see all links to pages containing synonyms for the word “best,” but none of them will contain this word.

3. Vague search
In case you have not decided on a specific keyword to search, the “*” operator will help.
For example, the phrase “best * image editor” will select the best editors for all types of images, be it digital, raster, vector, etc.

4. Search to choose from options
Using the “|” operator, you can perform a Google search on multiple combinations of phrases, replacing multiple words in different places.
For example, let’s enter the phrase “buy a case | pen” will give us pages containing either “buy a case” or “buy a pen”

5. Meaning of the word
To find out the meaning of a particular word, just enter “define:” into the search line and after the colon the desired phrase.

6. Exact match
To find an exact match of the search results with the query, it is enough to enclose the keywords in quotation marks.

7. Search a specific site
To search for keywords on only one site, just add the following syntax to the search phrase - “site:”.

9. Unit converter
The Google search engine can also convert values ​​at the user's request.
For example, we need to know how much 1 kg is in pounds. We type the following query: “1 kg in pounds”

10. Currency converter
In order to find out the exchange rate at the official rate, type the following search query: “1 [currency] to [currency]”

11. Time in the city
If you want to find out the time for any city, then use the syntax: “time” or the Russian equivalent of “time” and the name of the city.

12. Google calculator
Google can count online! Just type the example into the search bar and it will give you the result.

13. Search by file type
If you need to find something by a specific file type, Google has a “filetype:” operator that searches by given file extension.

14. Finding a cached page
Google has its own servers where it stores cached pages. If you need exactly this, then use the operator: “cached:”

15. Weather forecast for the city
Another Google search operator is the weather operator. Just enter “weather” and the city, and you will see whether it will rain or not
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16. Translator
You can translate words immediately without leaving the search engine. The following syntax is responsible for translation: “translate [word] into [language]”

How Google discovers web pages, crawls them, and returns results.

This article provides two explanations of how Google Search works: a brief explanation and a detailed explanation.

Google receives information from various sources. Here are examples of some of them:

• web pages;
• Content added by users, such as what they post to Google My Business and Google Maps;
• scanned books;
• open databases on the Internet;
• many other sources.

This article will only focus on content posted on web pages.

Brief explanation

Generating search results for web pages takes place in three stages, which are described below.

Scanning

First you need to determine what pages are on the Internet. Since there is no official registry of them, Google robot has to constantly search for new pages and add them to the list of already known ones. This process is called scanning.

Information about existing pages comes to us in several ways. In some cases, the Google robot automatically detects pages during the crawling process. He can also go to them using links posted on other pages. In addition, the site owner can send the file to Google himself Sitemap with a list of pages to be scanned. Finally, if you created your site using a third-party service, such as Wix or Blogger, that hosting provider may tell Google to crawl pages you've added or edited.

How to improve scanning efficiency

• You can request that individual URLs be crawled if changes were made only to the relevant pages.
• On pages that are already known to Google, link to your new pages when you publish them. note that our robot will not click on links that do not comply with the Google Webmaster Guidelines, such as those included in ads and comments, or posted for a fee.
• If you only need to scan one page, select Home for this. This is considered the most important page on your site. If you need a full scan of the site, make sure that it has easy navigation with links to all key sections and pages of the resource. This will make it easier for users and Google robots to navigate your site.

We do not provide more frequent crawling or higher site rankings for a fee. Those who say otherwise are misleading you.

Indexing

After finding a page, you need to determine what topic its content is dedicated to. This process is called indexing. It consists in the fact that Google analyzes the content of the page and systematizes the images and embedded videos found on it. The received information is stored in Google index– a huge database located on many computers.

How to Improve Indexing Efficiency

• Create short and informative page titles.
• Use appropriate topic headings on your pages.
• There should be a sufficient amount of text on your pages. Google can recognize the content of some pictures and videos, but not as effectively as in the case of text. Whenever possible, annotate your videos and images using various attributes such as alt.

Delivery of results and ranking

When a user enters a query, Google searches its index for the most relevant results based on numerous factors. These factors include location, language, user device type (PC or phone), etc. For example, results for "bicycle repair" will vary depending on whether you are in Paris or Hong Kong. Ranking is carried out according to specified algorithms, and Google does not increase the ranking of pages for a fee.

How to Improve Your Ranking Effectiveness

• Make sure your page loads quickly and is optimized for mobile devices.
• Place useful content on the page and update it promptly.
• Follow the guidelines provided in the Google Webmaster Guidelines to ensure a good browsing experience on your site.
• Study Introduction to Search Engine Optimization.
• Please review our guidelines for assessing the quality of search results.

Detailed explanation

Want to know more? We have provided for this.

Version for the curious

Scanning

Crawl is the process by which Googlebot discovers new and updated pages to add to Google's index.

We use a huge network of computers to crawl the content of billions of web pages. The program that does the crawling is called Googlebot (or spider). This robot operates completely automatically: it independently determines which sites to crawl, how often it needs to be done, and also how many pages to select from each of them.

Google's crawling process starts with a list of web page URLs generated from previous crawling sessions. It is supplemented by data from Sitemap files provided by webmasters. By crawling each of these sites, Googlebot finds links on each page and adds them to the list of pages to crawl. All new and changed sites, as well as broken links, are flagged, and subsequently the corresponding data appears in the Google index.

How does Google find pages?

Googlebot finds pages in a variety of ways. Among other things, these include the following:

• following links from other sites;
• processing data in Sitemap files.

How does Google determine which pages not to crawl?

• If access to a page is blocked in the robots.txt file, it will not be crawled, but may still be indexed if another site has a link to it. Please note that Google can determine the topic of the page based on the content of the link and index it without analyzing the materials published on it.
• Googlebot can't crawl pages that are not accessible to anonymous users, that is, pages that require you to log in or sign in to view.
• Less frequently scanned are pages that are considered to be exact copies of pages that have already been scanned.

How to improve scanning efficiency

Follow the steps below to make it easier for Google to find relevant pages on your site.

• Use simple, readable and structured URL paths, as well as thoughtful direct internal links.
• If your site uses URL parameters, such as to indicate the user's country in an international online store, tell Google important details about them by using the URL Parameters tool.
• Use the instructions in your robots.txt file to reduce server load by specifying which pages can be added to Google's index and which ones should be crawled first. This file should not be viewed solely as a way to block access to content and prevent it from being indexed.
• Use the hreflang attribute to indicate page versions in different languages.
• Specify canonical and alternate pages.
• Use the indexing report.

Indexing

Googlebot analyzes each page it crawls to create a comprehensive index of all the words it finds, as well as where on the page they are found. Additionally, we take into account data from core tags and attributes, such as tags