{"id":1000133,"date":"2006-08-30T05:27:29","date_gmt":"2006-08-30T10:27:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/privacy\/2006\/08\/30\/changing-search-engines\/"},"modified":"2006-08-31T11:47:36","modified_gmt":"2006-08-31T16:47:36","slug":"changing-search-engines","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/privacy\/2006\/08\/30\/changing-search-engines\/","title":{"rendered":"Changing Search Engines"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve become increasingly concerned about Google’s storing of search data. I use various cookie blockers, page rewriters, and other tools to limit the information Google gets about me. Nonetheless I still have a static IP address<\/a> that’s only shared with a few other people; and if any company has the skill and talent to aggregate search requests to build profiles of people and invade their privacy, it’s Google. Consequently, I’m switching over Firefox to use a different search engine. I thought I’d start by trying generic.a9.com which promises not to track me. (The regular www.a9.com does track users.) Here’s how:
\n<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Type about:config in the location bar<\/li>\n
  2. Type “keyword” in the Filter field<\/li>\n
  3. Right-click keyword.URL<\/b> and select “Modify” from the pop-up menu<\/li>\n
  4. Change the value to http:\/\/generic.a9.com\/<\/code><\/li>\n
  5. Click OK.<\/li>\n
  6. Close the window<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    \"Changing<\/p>\n

    That’s it. You’re now using A9’s generic service. Update: It seems A9 violates the URL spec somehow by treating http:\/\/generic.a9.com\/query%20term differently from http:\/\/generic.a9.com\/query+term. it works with the former but not the latter, which is what Firefox sends for multiword queries. That rules it out. I’ll have to try a different one. <\/p>\n

    Other search engines can be configured similarly. Just the URL changes. In most cases, however, you’ll need more than the URL for the home page. For instance, the URL for IXQuick is http:\/\/us.ixquick.com\/do\/metasearch.pl?query=<\/code><\/p>\n

    The big question is how the other search services compare to Google. So far, A9 does not seem to be doing so well. It used to be better, but it used to be powered by Google. Now it’s powered by Microsoft’s Live.com, a distinctly inferior search engine. IxQuick is a meta search engine that accumulates results from several search engines. The theory is that a URL that shows up in several search engines is more likely to be relevant than one that only shows up in one or two. The reality is that the bad results from non-Google engines end up polluting the good results from Google. Plus it looks uglier than Google. Scroogle<\/a> is nothing more than an anonymizing, ad-free front-end to Google. That makes it one of the better alternatives out there, except that it violates the web architecture by using POST for safe operations instead of GET. Consequently, it can’t be used from within Firefox’s search bar and location bars. <\/p>\n

    Still, even if the other search engines are a little slower, uglier, and less effective than Google, I’m just not comfortable with Google storing all my search requests tied to my IP address for an undefined but lengthy period of time, so I’m going to try living with the others for a few weeks. I’ll let you know how it goes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    I’ve become increasingly concerned about Google’s storing of search data. I use various cookie blockers, page rewriters, and other tools to limit the information Google gets about me. Nonetheless I still have a static IP address that’s only shared with a few other people; and if any company has the skill and talent to aggregate […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[410],"class_list":["post-1000133","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-privacy","tag-flash"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1000133","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1000133"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1000133\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1000133"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1000133"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1000133"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}