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Please do yourself a favor and quit using Bing, Yahoo, Google, and AOL.
LOL!
I see a lot of Google, Bing, Yahoo, and AOL search users. When I log on to my WordPress account, I see things about you (yes, you) that I shouldn’t know, because your search engine is telling me.
They spy on you. They have a history of turning over the information they save about you to marketers, profilers, advertisers, and law enforcement without a warrant. You really don’t want them saving information on what you searched for and what you clicked on and associating it with your Internet Protocol address (or even worse, your Google Account if you have logged in.). This information is ripe for abuse.
What’s worse is that most of your searches go out unencrypted, in plain view (although Firefox 14 fixed this problem, at least with Google), which makes your searches plainly visible to your ISP and subject to alteration/censorship at your ISP’s level. This is one reason why you should install HTTPS Everywhere.
I deleted Bing, Yahoo, Amazon, Twitter, and EBay out of my Firefox search list a while back and added IxQuick, Startpage, and DuckDuckGo instead. (I left Google in there but moved it to the bottom of the list.)
None of these three record any information about you.
Startpage is a subsidiary of IxQuick, and it gives Google results to you behind their proxy, which keeps Google from knowing who is doing the searching. IxQuick is a metasearch engine with the same privacy policy. DuckDuckGo can be useful, they have their own unique features (like Zero Click boxes) and search index.
Each one of them has a link to add their search engine to your browser, it’s really easy to do, and the only thing you’ll miss is your current search engine spying on you/”bubbling” you.
See more about how most search engines “track” and “bubble” you at these sites created by DuckDuckGo: http://donttrack.us/ and http://dontbubble.us/ (Startpage, IxQuick, and DuckDuckGo don’t track or bubble you.)
One last note for AOL and Yahoo users: Yahoo is just Bing with another layer of privacy issues and AOL Search is just Google with another layer of privacy issues. In fact, AOL once publicly released a bunch of personally-identifiable (but somewhat obscured) information that they had stored about user searches. That link I added takes you to a searchable database of all that information that AOL collected about those people. Much attention was paid to a User 927, who searched for things like “skin mold”, “tranny bondage”, and how to make sangria.
User 927
One product of the AOL scandal was the proliferation of blog entries examining the exposed data. Certain users’ search logs were identified as humorous, disturbing, or even dangerous.
Consumer watchdog website The Consumerist posted a blog entry by editor Ben Popken identifying the anonymous user number 927as having an especially bizarre and macabre search history. The blog posting has since been viewed nearly 4,000 times and referenced on a number of other high-profile sites.In addition to sparking the interest of the Internet community, User 927 inspired a theatrical production, written by Katharine Clark Gray in Philadelphia. The play, also named User 927, has since been cited on several of the same blogs that originally discovered the real user’s existence.As time has passed, more artistic renderings of individual user logs have appeared. A series of movies on the web site Minimovies.org called “I Love Alaska” puts to voice and imagery to user 711391which the authors have labeled as “an episodic documentary”.
Don’t be a user 927, ditch your current search engine in favor of one that isn’t spying on you and install HTTPS Everywhere today.
