Secret Searches by Chi-Hobbyist
sing search engines comes at
a cost. You search for whatever
your devious little mind can think
of. Meanwhile, the search engine is
constructing a pro?le of you and your
search habits. Sometimes, this is done
blatantly, such as when you log into a
Google account before beginning your
Google searches.
U
Other times, it can be done more
subtly. (A pro?le can be constructed
of you even when it is not tied to a
speci?c account.)
If you’ve been following the stories
about companies
handing over data
on its customers
to government
of?cials without
the consent of
those customers,
this should give
you pause. Even
if your naughty
searches aren’t things that the NSA
would be interested in, you still don’t
necessarily want your search habits to
be shared with a third party.
Fortunately, there is a search engine
that allows searches to be anonymous
and does not create a pro?le of you.
Duck Duck Go. ( http://duckduckgo.
com ) And it does have a pretty good
representation of sites indexed. When
I searched for my favorite sites for
naughty mischief, I found them quite
readily. While it was a little bit dif?cult
at ?rst to move away from a big-name
search engine like Google, I don’t ?nd
myself thinking that Duck Duck Go is a
second-rate search engine.
On my Windows laptop, I ?nd that I
can set up Duck Duck Go on Inter-
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net Explorer, Chrome, Firefox, and
the ever-important Tor browser. On
my smart phone, I ?nd that not all
browsers are ?exible about letting
one change the default search engine.
However, the Tor-based Orweb browser
on Android uses Duck Duck Go as a
default. There’s also a DuckDuckGo
app which acts like a browser with the
Duck Duck Go search as its main page.
YMMV with this app. By default, the
app can be cluttered with news stories
that aren’t directly
relevant to your
search results,
but this feature
can be disabled.
The app will also
save recently used
search terms on
your phone, but
this feature can
also be disabled.
But of course, you
don’t need to use
the app. You can also just bring up
the Duck Duck Go search page in any
browser you choose.
The Duck Duck Go search engine is
not a magic bullet, but is just another
tool in the quest for privacy. Once you
use the search engine to connect to a
web site, Duck Duck Go won’t pass any
information about you or your search
terms to the web site. However, once
you’ve connected to a web site, Duck
Duck Go has no control over how that
web site respects your privacy. And
having your privacy maintained once
you’re on other web si tes is the subject
for another column...
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