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Firefox to collect your (anonymized) search data
(blog.mozilla.org)
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this post was submitted on 14 May 2024
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Telemetry doesn't need topic categorization. This is building a dataset for AI.
That would be a terrible AI.
The example of the "search optimization" they want to improve is Firefox Suggest, which has sponsored results which could be promoted (and cost more) based on predictions of interest based on recent trends of topics in your country. "Users in Belgium search for vacations more during X time of day" is exactly the sort of stuff you'd use to make ads more valuable. "Users in France follow a similar pattern, but two weeks later" is even better. Similarly predicting waves of infection based on the rise and fall of "health" searches is useful for public health, but also for pushing or tabling ad campaigns.