I'm Trying to find out What does or can google.com detect from your system when using google.com to perform a search? The obvious ones comes to mind are: Location / IP Browser However does google also detect the following? Operating System Screen Resolution Typing Speed Any I have missed? The reason I ask is that Im trying to find out what fingerprints google use in order to develop an application relating to search.
Definitely OS, browser model, IP, screen resolution, probably even more technical stuff. A raw location depending on what gadget do you use to google. That's just the obvious stuff. The interesting thing is that Google can learn almost everything about you by cross-referencing the information from different sources: Gmail, your Android phone, G+ and etc.
I honestly doubt they'd take into account the OS or resolution. Yes it is possible to obtain that info, however I don't think Google makes any use of it when it displays your search results. It probably would take into account previous browsing history though, and perhaps based on your cookies in the browser it may make suggestions, but I'm not sure.
Google, like others, almost certainly log everything your browser gives them. You can uniquely identify a user across multiple websites using proxies just by looking at their browser data, your browser gives information such as what addons you have, scripts, languages installed, other more unique Operating System details as well as the fonts you have installed. Every small little thing about these allows them to narrow you down to a unique little snowflake. If you don't want to be identified then use a system that you DO NOT use to install or update anything about. Use a fresh install of everything with only the very basic of standard stuff on board, this ensures that you're probably one of millions with setups of that type as opposed to the unique snowflake you become when you've added to your system. Try out this website, they've been testing browsers for uniqueness for a long time now, was a frontpage article about it on reddit about a year ago. You'll better understand what I'm talking about. panopticlick.eff.org/ (Sorry, I'm unable to add links just yet) With this data and some clever algorithms it's likely that even if you go off their radar and your system changes a little bit they are able to predict that occurrence and recognise you as the same fingerprint down the line.
Hmm, that's a very interesting site. If google is really storing all this information, they've got to have a near infinite bandwidth and storage space. To store for each visit to google.
They've certainly got over a million servers. They said in a presentation a couple of years back that they were preparing themselves for the future where they would have 10million. So yeah, they have a ludicrous amount of space and bandwidth. Source: datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2009/10/20/google-envisions-10-million-servers/ (Apologies for not being able to link, again)
Basically, you can't fool them. IP, Screen resolution, browser and OS definitely. Along with browsing patterns, email, social network activity.... I'm sure I'm missing some things. They even used wifi triangulation to pinpoint where you live. They drove around in their Google maps mobile and spied on home wifi networks. They got in trouble for that one.
Google identifies you in two ways. The first way for them to identify you is when you're logged to your google account (this can be gmail, Youtube, G+, even Chrome browser). The second way they identify a user is via a cookie. When you visit google.com, they plant a tracking cookie to your browser and collect pretty much the same information. So, when you check you rankings, it's better to use keyword ranking software, because it is usually location and user agnostic, and your results do not get personalized.