Eyes in the web

Actually, the reason for this post was a curious case, which led to some thoughts about how our activities in the network can be used by various companies. I had met with similar situations from time to time, but today it repeated somehow quite clearly and openly, so I decided to consult with more knowledgeable people. In general, this was the case.

The weather has been excellent throughout the last week in St. Petersburg, so on a sunny Saturday morning a reasonable question arose: where to take the child so that he and I would not be bored. All sorts of attractions, stupidly killing time / money and not carrying a humanitarian burden, were left as a last resort, and according to the results of such introductory items as the specifics of the city, favorable weather conditions and personal preferences of both “participants”, the choice fell on water excursion walks. Naturally, for starters, an online search was made for possible options for implementing the “marine plan”, the necessary calls were made, and after 15-20 minutes the weekend program was almost ready.

However, this lyrical digression does not have any specific purpose - it can only be noted from it that the preparation of rest was carried out using a worldwide network by searching for information. The surprises began today, on Sunday, when before bedtime I decided to quickly look through - what new has happened on constantly visited resources over the past two days. And on the Computerrara-online site I found here such an ad unit from Yandex.Direct, clearly intended for me personally.



"Bingo!" - Six out of six ads offer me water excursions in St. Petersburg. And all would be fine, but I just searched on Saturday using Google, which is set by default both in the search field and in the Express panel! And this is for me at the moment an absolute mystery - how the history of search queries on Google became the property of Yandex.

Version 1
Opera sends the history of search queries to Yandex
IMHO - unrealistic. Firstly, I read our contract with Yandex and there are absolutely no even hints of such services. Secondly, I know for sure that the browser does not have such functionality in principle.

Version 2
Google shares the history of search queries with Yandex,
too, fantastic. No competitor will provide such information to an opponent.

Version 3
Yandex somehow tracks search queries on Google.
But here somehow there is already no certainty about the impossibility of such a feint. Both Google and Yandex set their Cookies in the browsers of users, so what prevents one from “peeping” the information in another, competing? Also, the browser saves your browsing history and, perhaps, this information can also be "read" using cookies. For some reason, this option looks closest to reality, although I have not conducted detailed studies and cannot say anything definite with indisputable evidence.

If someone has the time and opportunity to experiment and find the answer to this riddle - it would be very interesting to know the result.

PS And the weekend went fine - the water excursions turned out to be quite a topic, and on Sunday even managed to “hold on to the oars” in Ozerki.