InformAction Forums

kukla wrote:...block Google cookies; as always, keep using NS.

If I ever have to confront the gorilla, of course it's with no cookies, bananas, or scripting. You might be interested in this thread about using ABE to disallow any Google scripting anywhere except for their reCaptcha and Maps functions.

Except they do seem to know my IP.

Every website you visit has to know *an* IP, else, how will they know where to send the page?
(Yes, moderators can see yours, to be able to ban spammers, but it would be unethical to disclose it publicly.)
Some people use proxies or TOR to shield their real IP. A personal choice for each user.

Depending on your ISP, your own IP may be changed periodically, or you can force changes in various ways. Thus throwing enough variables at them to dilute the value of what's compiled under a single IP. If mine changes, presumably the old one was given to someone else, whose browsing habits, search queries, etc. are probably very different from mine. (Assuming DHCP and not a static IP, which DSL usually is, at least where I am.)

This was what was so great about Scroogle. They stripped off your IP and substituted theirs in the request to Google, retrieved it, and sent it back to your IP. So all Google saw was the pool of Scroogle IPs. If they could have afforded to have more than six (IIRC) servers/IPs, maybe the bump in traffic would have fallen underneath Google's radar. Or rotated IPs of their requests to Google ...

I've taken it one step further and added Google HTTPS to search engines.

Agree -- if we have to face the monster, might as well keep the other monsters out of the fight, and use only https, never http.

Update: In another thread, a user reminded me of another privacy-aware search engine that I used to use, but had forgotten about: Ixquick.
https://www.ixquick.com/

Privacy policy

This surrogate doesn't work anymore in Nightly because requestpolicy show a 302 redirect. With Firefox 12 it works well

Confirmed. Current Nightly breaks Surrogates (all them). A work around is on its way.

Fixed in latest development build 2.4rc1, thanks.

Tom T. wrote:Update: In another thread, a user reminded me of another privacy-aware search engine that I used to use, but had forgotten about: Ixquick.
https://www.ixquick.com/

Since this was re-opened, it's a good time to tell of an even better alternative to Google than Ixquick.
https://startpage.com

It's the same people as Ixquick, but with Google results added to their own search results. Same superior privacy policy.

Thanks to Giorgio for keeping Google surrogates up-to-date.
Or we could all use other search engines, and not be concerned about surrogates.