Why You Should Be Using a Private Search Engine
blog.searchencrypt.com
blog.searchencrypt.com
Why You Should Use Private Search Engines?
The truth is, people know that search engines are
tracking them. Most websites have privacy policies
which clearly state that they use cookies and other
means of tracking users. Any in many cases, when we
are asked to give apps, websites, or products
permission to track us, we blindly agree. This may
seem acceptable at first, but it’s problematic if that
same tracker is following you two years later, when
you’ve forgotten about it.
Your search engine should be optimized for searching
the internet, not tracking you once you’ve left. Your
Google information can be used against you in legal
cases, even in civil cases like divorces.
1. You might forget about trackers you've accepted.
2. Your search history can be used against you in the court of law.
They couldn't come up with anything better for this ad?
Masking front ends are ok but not any more effective than say using Tor to route your search requests.
Today this suggestion, you should use a private search engine, is equivalent in my mind to you should only use cash to buy things. When you have a panoptic view of both, digital and commercial activity the ability to create a reconstruction of what you have been doing or thinking through meta-data analysis becomes quite difficult to avoid.
At this point having your browser spam with other searches as a fuzzing technique would be effective.
I suggested (only half joking) that a fundable startup might be a system where subscribers send in their license plate and for $10/month or something every month they will get an envelope with one, two, or three other license plate symbols printed on magnetic material to stick to your car. It doesn't have to look like a license plate to you and me, only to an automated license plate reader which leaves a lot of room for avoiding state laws about having multiple plates.
The idea being that members plates will be thoroughly mixed with a bunch of false hits in license plate reader data bases everywhere making use of that data impractical for your enemies.
BTW the license plate thing has been done by my friends with store loyalty cards, but after a while everyone got bored doing it.
Downloading a dump of Wikipedia or Stackoverflow and indexing it however you like on mid range hardware is trivial today. Look at what Kiwix or Zeal(offline doc browser) do today. It's just a matter of time before people start packaging up data and indexes customized to your info needs downloadable like a song from iTunes.
Of course you can hold much fewer pages in your index if you are not particularly broad in your searches. The gotcha there is that when you need that thing you don’t normally need, you either have to go online or go without.
Not impossible of course, just that the scale may be larger than you expect.
My estimate based on my own usage for the past year and a half or so, of curating my own local indexes is about 30-40 million docs. This is the equivalent of having your own personal Library of Alexandria (text and images no video). I don't have numbers but I work offline a lot and my guess is 70-80% of my queries are probably getting satisfied by my local dumps.
For example, I have digitized roughly 300 volumes (books) which collectively represent about 100,000 pages of information. That collection which represents a big chunk of my originally print reference library creates a relatively small n-gram index of about 22 GB. But it is a small sample of generally available reference material and doesn't include the 22 years of digitized Scientific American articles (much harder to parse out for indexing when starting with the PDF form). But it still answers a lot of reference queries quickly and accurately for things I am interested in. For things that I become interested in and have yet to have started curating a set of references for, its worthless.
As a result my experience is that the closer I get to my long term interests the more likely I am to find something in my library to answer the question, things that are more temporal (news, new research) are not there at all generally, and things that are only now of interest are similarly not represented. The thing that Search engines do so remarkably well is that they cover a very wide swath of interesting material preemptively.
To host that locally would be a more significant effort for me.
We explained how this works in this post: https://blog.searchencrypt.com/tech/remove-search-encrypt-ex...
- "We utilize the latest encryption technologies, including a feature known as Perfect Forward Secrecy which goes a step further than traditional SSL by using a unique public key for each individual session"
- "Even server logs are disabled to ensure that any identifiable information your browser may be broadcasting" with requests are never read or stored on our servers.
- "On top of all that we utilize an extra layer of query encryption at the client side in order to ensure that your history remains private from other users who may access your computer"
The 3rd involves a closed-source browser extension doing who-knows-what... and who's it been audited by?
This is more info on how we encrypt your searches.
Any marketer worth their salt would do this too. If you don't, you're wasting a golden opportunity.