Eyes on the web

Actually, the reason for this post was a curious case, which led to some reflections on how our activities in the network can be used by various companies. I had occasionally met with similar situations before, but today it repeated somehow very clearly and blatantly, so I decided to consult with more knowledgeable people. In general, it was like that.

The weather throughout the last week in St. Petersburg was excellent, 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 rides, stupidly killing time / money and not carrying the humanitarian burden, were left as a last resort, and as a result of such introductory as the specifics of the city, favorable weather conditions and personal predilections of both “participants”, the choice fell on water excursion walks. Naturally, an online search was made for the start of possible options for implementing the “sea plan”, the necessary refinement calls were made, and after 15–20 minutes the program for the weekend was almost ready.
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However, this lyrical digression does not carry any definite goal - from it we can only note that the preparation of the rest was made using the worldwide network by searching for information. The surprises began today, on Sunday, when I decided to skim ahead of bedtime to see what was new on the constantly visited resources over the past two days. And on the website Computerry-online, I found such an ad unit from Yandex.Direct, which is clearly intended for me personally.



“Bingo!” - six out of six ads offer me water excursions in St. Petersburg. And everything would be fine, but on Saturday I only made a search using Google, which is installed by default in the search field and on 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 search query history to Yandex
IMHO - is unreal. Firstly, I read our agreement with Yandex and there is absolutely no even a hint of such services. Secondly, I know for sure that in the browser there is no such functionality in principle.

Version 2
Google shares search history with Yandex
Also fantastic. No competitor will provide such information to the opponent.

Version 3
Yandex somehow tracks search queries in Google
And here already somehow there is no certainty that such a trick is impossible. Both Google and Yandex set their cookies in users' browsers, so what prevents one from “spying on” information in another competing? Also, the browser saves the history of visits and, perhaps, this information can also be “read” using cookies. For some reason, this option looks closest to reality, although I did not conduct detailed research and can not say something 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 was great - the water excursions turned out to be quite a topic, and on Sunday even managed to “hold the oars” in Ozerki.