Well, Google seems to deteriorate a bit. Started a few weeks ago when their cached view went away. Yesterday evening it had a notorious upchuck. This morning the topper, it keeps popping up some preference screen with a warning that cookies must be enabled. No way.
Tried Bing, Yahoo, Dogpile and many other. None of them very good, some utterly useless.
At least in Firefox you can configure cookies to expire at the end of a session. Of course, if you're doing something that requires "signing in" to a given web site no amount of obscuring indirection will preserve your anonymity.
What are you trying to *avoid* by avoiding cookies? You can set your browser to discard them -- at will.
Do you enable Flash? If so, there are *persistent* cookies camped on your machine that your browser won't (unless you've installed special extensions designed to handle these specifically!) just discard.
Even if you avoid cookies entirely, you'd need to vary your IP address to avoid any sort of profiling.
*And*, even if you avoid *that*, your browser's fingerprint can be used to (somewhat) track you -- especially if you do *anything* "atypical" with your settings! :-/
Proxies/anonymizers *might* help but I wouldn't count on it. There's money to be made by tracking you -- hence the reason its done :> And, "they" have the advantage of deploying *a* solution to deal with MILLIONS of "targets" :-/
Note that even your DNS queries provide important information! (I notice google is now dangling a "fast DNS service" as yet another carrot to tempt people to expose their traffic... since it tells them where you go even when you *aren't* searching!)
Best is subjective. From time to time I resort to scroogle, ixquick, et al.
Well, since Helmut and John said there is basically no competitioon to Google I set an exception. But something is fishy. When I looked for antenna stuff it only linked correctly to found links such as wikipedia or some universities. Other sites such as this
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show up fine in other seearch engines, inlcuding ixquick.
In Google they now often jump over to some sales site or "blendersearch" or whatever. Not very useful.
I think a year ago or more I read some news thing saying that google had changed their search engine from an approach that was the same for everyone to an approach that was tailored to the individual. I gathered from the article that some folks felt this was an invasion of privacy and that the portents were dire. I didn't think much about it at the time, but you saying the above reminded me about it. Maybe that is what is going on. google doesn't like you. ;)
Doesn't matter. It is pulled from a fixed size pool of addresses. There's just *way* too much data that can be used to "identify" you (not as "Joerg" but, rather, as "user 323492857 with the following search preferences, network activity, etc.")
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gives you a quick idea of how much your browser is telling the world about who you are. I.e., the more you *tweek* your settings, the more you STAND OUT! :-/
Note that the scripts on each page along with the sites that are linked *onto* that page also leak information each time you visit a page created with one of those "features".
E.g., akamai.net likes to "supply" lots of trivial images that are used on other web sites (e.g., I noticed that an *icon* for a "canceled check" was fetched from their domain when sorting out my sister's bank statements. Why couldn't the bank have an icon of a canceled check on their server? Is a 50 byte file to big for them to handle?? :> )
If you look at what is actually happening when you fetch a web page, you'd be amused at how much is going on that you are completely oblivious to in that blink of an eye!
You can intentionally opt to use their DNS server. But, even if you *don't* whichever server you are using has access to that information. Recall (earlier this year?) some huge portion of DNS traffic was diverted through China. Gee, I wonder if that was just an honest mistake? :>
Note, also, that google actually provides email services to many "private" ISPs -- without the knowledge of their clients.
I.e., the things that (disabling) cookies tries to prevent can be handled with other (less efficient) server side mechanisms. If you have the resources google does and the *desire* to gather this information, you can *bet* they've got a pretty good handle on it.
Recall google earth's cars now (?) identify private access points and snoop on traffic there. So, chances are, they've seen a fair bit of traffic to further refine (with geographical coordinates) where "things" (people) are.
[It's always amusing to see the services that google offers and ponder what their "ulterior motives" might be. "Free internet phone?" "Free document management?" etc.]
Those all work when clicked on from within your post. When I do the same from inside the Google results page some also work, but some lead to "sponsored links", or in good old American wording, a sales pitch. This never happened before, it started this morning, and only with Google.
When I search for Yagi antennas that does not always mean I want to buy one :-)
please check that you really have enabled Google search. What icon do you see on the left of the search field? Maybe scour.com, ask.com or something else but not Google. If yes, then change this back to the Google icon.
Tried it and the reults are rather nondescript. First line item shows three browsers that I probably use, one of which is correct. Great, now they now I am one of xx million. The 2nd line item has the accept header, nothing special there either. Items 3 through 8 have "No" as value entry.
Yeah, but millions of other have those features. It's like "Oh, he drives a Toyota!" :-)
Yep, I've seen that. I am not paranoid about all that. It's just that when they slam me with ads like what happens here with Google, I don't like that.
Darn, back in the days Altavista was such a great search engine but then it fizzled.
Not mine. I know that for a fact. My ISP "outsourced" that to Yahoo. There have been some issues with that so basically I run all my email accounts through a (paid) commercial provider and I know where their servers are. I still have one with my ISP but it's not important and not used for business.
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