Google Search Now Uses Service Worker For Repeated Searches (venturebeat.com) 77
An anonymous reader writes: Google Search is now using Service Worker to cache repeated searches, loading results twice as fast. The tidbit was shared this week by Dion Almaer, Google director of engineering, and Ben Galbraith, Google senior director of product, at Pluralsight Live in Salt Lake City, Utah. "Google Search's mission is to get relevant results to you as quickly as possible," Almaer said onstage. "So they invested in the largest deployment of Service Worker probably out there by being able to extra work on the fly and give you results sometimes twice as fast."
Re: Off topic, but true: anime is bad (Score:2)
Can this be prevented? (Score:1)
Is there any way to prevent Google from using Service Worker? That would be far more valuable to me than being able to repeat a search in half the time.
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It's pretty easy to anticipate some ugly use cases.
Service Worker is akin to a transparent proxy. One can imagine hosting sites injecting a Service Worker into a page and getting absolute control over every request; perfect tracking, altering every response in some manner, etc.
Re: Can this be prevented? (Score:2)
Hosting sites? You mean sites that already have full control over everything on the page?
They are relatively tame, highly restrictive and can only affect the site they belong to. If someone can inject a service worker somewhere then you have bigger problems since they'd also be able to inject regular JavaScript with far fewer restrictions.
Cross-site flaws comprise most web vulnerabilities (Score:2)
> You mean sites that already have full control over everything on the page?
> They are relatively tame, highly restrictive and can only affect the site they belong to.
Is what they said about JavaScript. There aren't any vulnerabilities associated with JavaScript, right?
The same origin policy is a good idea, but browsers and web developers keep screwing it up, over and over again. Cross site request vulnerabilities and the most common type of vulnerability there is, according to HackerOne.
( https://ww [zdnet.com]
Re:Can this be prevented? (Score:4, Informative)
From https://developers.google.com/... [google.com]
"A service worker is a script that your browser runs in the background, separate from a web page"
It's not like a transparent proxy at all. I don't know why they don't just let your browser cache the page of search results instead of replicating the functionality with a script.
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Because they want to track what you do and when, and show you dynamic ads for every distinct page view (the search results may stay the same, but the ads do not, as ads may get shown more times than what was paid for if they are cached). But yes, all of this complexity should be totally unnecessary. They just found a way to continue exerting the level of control and tracking they want while not harming performance quite as bad.
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Great conspiracy, but what you were talking about was already achieved by the Javascript they had in place.
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Re:Can this be prevented? (Score:5, Informative)
Yes.
https://www.ghacks.net/2016/03... [ghacks.net]
tl; dr: about:config, disable service workers
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Google's browser doesn't let you prevent Google from running background jobs on your machine?
I'm shocked. Shocked, I say. You should be entitled to a full refund of Chrome's purchase price.
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You should be entitled to a full refund of Chrome's purchase price.
That'd be fine if there were a Firefoxbook.
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Mozilla discontinued Firefox OS on phones, and it never expanded to the laptop form factor in the first place.
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More standing than people who don't even use it and have no reason to complain at all.
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Thanks!
If I understand this, I really don't like service workers.
If I (still) understand the way the web works, I really like the concept: I connect to a website; the website can't connect to me.
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Javascipt has pretty much ended that.
For a while now, you connect to a web site and the site then loads its own libraries and executable code, as well as libraries and executable code from any number (I've seen 30+) of third party sites.
You basically have no chance of understanding what's being done with your resources or to your machine (or your personal information) if you're letting sites run javascript on your machine.
You can mitigate this somewhat with plugins like noscript, but you'll still need to ma
And ten times as old (Score:3)
But only if you've already asked the same thing before.
And only if you don't care for anything that happened since the LAST time you searched.
How is this an issue? (Score:1)
Is waiting for a web search to return the results actually thing people sit and wait for? I can't remember ever having to wait, even when having to use dial-up. It smells like a non-news item, trying to get users to go back to google.com.
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Search can be “sometime twice as fast” (Score:4, Interesting)
I can’t say that I’ve ever thought “these search results loaded too slowly”. I have, on the other hand, said “why doesn’t Google do something about these pages which somehow manage to get highly ranked but don’t actually contain content which answers my question?”
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I can’t say that I’ve ever thought “these search results loaded too slowly”.
I just opened up Google and typed: "Are you slow Google?" The first line said "About 705.000.000 results (in about 0,45 seconds)". Yeah. There's a lot of things to complain about but speed of loading results is not one of them.
Re: Search can be “sometime twice as fast&am (Score:2)
No you clearly didn't get anything.
At best you could claim from my post that there are 705million answer to the question. But they could be 705 million "NO!"s
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Keh?, why don't you do something about it https://duckduckgo.com/?q=duck... [duckduckgo.com]. Yeah googles searches have become pretty crappy, ad loaded, biased politically, advertising dollar shifted and really privacy invasive. Don't complain about Google simply stop using them, honestly you will feel better and your searches will be far more functional. Cut google back to maps only, until something better comes along, you know it will, just a matter of time.
Re:Search can be “sometime twice as fast& (Score:2)
Actually I use DDG as my default engine - have for a year or two. But occasionally when I don't get the search results I want, out of old habits I fall back to Google... and am invariably disappointed.
Re:Search can be “sometime twice as fast& (Score:2)
I have noticed on the occasional google test (the geek thing to keep track), they have been getting worse and more biased, more advertiser friendly, except when they are not. I noticed they would kick the advertisers regular search results, 'below the fold', when they served up the ad, to get you to click the ad and make the advertiser pay for that search, because the end user did not see them in the results and clicked the ad instead. Really bent that. You pay google ads words for worse google searches, gr
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I have, on the other hand, noticed that the DNS TTL for google.com is 300 seconds. Isn't that too low? Is it really necessary for a DNS server to check with google every 5 minutes?
Are those "Service Workers" next-gen trackers? (Score:2)
Whatever (Score:2)
Whatever 'Service Worker' is...
Google Gig (Score:2)
These service workers are underpaid minions for the tech giant, slaves that come running every time those upper class pages make a request. It's the gig economy, exploiting workers who linger in the background, hoping for something to do. Shamefully discarded when there isn't enough for them to do. They're probably using foreign undocumented code, too!
Wow, that poor guy! (Score:2)