geekhack
geekhack Community => Off Topic => Topic started by: BucklingSpring on Sun, 01 December 2013, 09:02:48
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There is a few centuries old adage saying “be careful what you wish for”.
Is it time now to update it to “be careful what you search for”?
The main Internet search engines keep track of every query for I don’t know how long. I’m sure they already have filters to discard the useless from the juicy stuff. Does it mean that we will only be remembered for the questionable searches we made?
I know many sites such as
https://www.ixquick.com/eng/advanced-search.html?&cat=web&query=
Offering “private” searches. But I don’t care to use them since they provide very limited results.
I pay for a VPN service to skew my geolocation and have access to all the different content Netflix is providing depending on your location. Does it make me a smuggler?
So the question is - Are you aware and do you do something about it?
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-delete- was meant to edit ^
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i switched to duckduckgo for anonymous search.
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i switched to duckduckgo for anonymous search.
Does it have a "advanced" search option?
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you can easily browse to their web site and see if it has what you want.
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I use DuckDuckGo, StartPage and ixquick. I don't think I can trust them (remember Lavabit?), but it's better than Google when you're signed in. In fact, I've used this combo for ages, because I didn't like living in a shell with Google serving my results based on my previous searches even when it made things harder to find for me.
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Another vote for Duckduckgo. The results aren't quite as good as Google, but IMHO it's "less evil" than Google.
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i've never been concerned about google's privacy issues. what took me away was awful quality of its services. the last drop for me was google web search language settings. i set the search results language to english, i enter the query, and i get a result in russian ON A FOURTH ****ING PLACE.
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i've never been concerned about google's privacy issues. what took me away was awful quality of its services. the last drop for me was google web search language settings. i set the search results language to english, i enter the query, and i get a result in russian ON A FOURTH ****ING PLACE.
That's what you get when you store too many Russian cookies on your drive ;-)
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to be honest, i don't remember having any of google-related cookies that contained anything related to russian.
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They do use OS language detection as well.
The computer at work does not use an English OS and no matter how hard I tried to get results in English... My search results are polluted by OS's language.
I suspect geolocation also got something to do with it.
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They do use OS language detection as well.
The computer at work does not use an English OS and no matter how hard I tried to get results in English... My search results are polluted by OS's language.
I suspect geolocation also got something to do with it.
Many sites do use your physical locale. I get really irritated when sites detect I'm in Finland and display the site in Finnish. With no language choice option available. Gee, thanks, Mr. Elite web coder, nice feature, maybe you should ALSO think before you use it.
You can try this if you use FireFox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/quick-locale-switcher/
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I suspect geolocation also got something to do with it.
it definitely does. i got the same results (as described above) on a machine with en_us locale located in moscow.