Tracker numbers for sites

kirkmc

In search results this morning, a link to the New York Times came up. Out of curiosity, I clicked the shield icon to see how many trackers there were. It showed 21.

When I went to the site, a cookie dialog displayed said "We and our 236 vendors use cookies."

That's a huge discrepancy, but perhaps a) Kagi can't see them all when indexing a page, or reading info if the result comes from another index, and b) multiple vendors get information from trackers. Any clarification on this?

iamcoat

kirkmc This is something that I've found interesting to watch as well. On occasion I've spotted conflicting numbers of reported/actual tracker counts, but only roughly eyeballing it with uBlock as a frame of reference. I've been meaning to take a deeper look into this, and took your example as an opportunity to do just that. I found that, in the case of NYT, Kagi's count is correct.

I used two browsers, both running the same version of uBlock; Tor for viewing the article in isolation, with uBlock disabled (the horror), and Librewolf to search for the same article with Kagi, so to better understand how Kagi "sees" the article after crawling. After some scrolling and other engagement mimicry, uBlock on Tor settled to a total of 21 unique tracking domains, the number Kagi reported for both of us.

For curiosity's sale, another with my standard uBlock settings enabled.

fxgn

236 is not the number of trackers on the page, it's the number of companies which get your tracker data. One tracker could give your data to multiple different data brokers.

RoxyRoxyRoxy

@fxgn is right in this regard, but I could see the amount of vendors being a useful metric to show in that dialog. Assuming we can find a source for that info, is that something people would like to see?

kirkmc

RoxyRoxyRoxy Yes, it would certainly be a sign of a site that is more interested in collecting data, and is less likely to have good content.