Steve offered an alternative to using Google’s search engine, falling into Google’s trap of gathering information about us.
Using an alternative like DuckDuckGo is OK, but lets face it, there really isn’t a “great” alternative to Google. We have all grown used to using the search engine and have our little tips and tricks for getting the results out of it we expect.
I offer an alternative to using a Google alternative…
Modern browsers these days allow you to access the Internet “privately”.
Safari has an option in it’s menus to set “Private Browsing…”:
Resulting in:
Chrome has “New Incognito Window…” in the Wrench menu:
Resulting in:
Firefox has “Start Private Browsing” in it’s Tools menu:
Resulting in:
Opera has “New Private Window” in it’s File menu:
Resulting in:
There are, of course, many other browsers out there. I suspect most have similar abilities to turn on private browsing.
I ran a little test with both Chrome (in normal mode) and Safari (in private mode) doing a search in Google for “Stephen Hargrove”. Sorry Steve, I wanted to make that the browsers were not pulling up any cache data.
This is Chrome’s normal access results:
Here is Safari’s Private access results:
You can see, there are some pretty significant differences in the results. In Chrome’s results, you can see that in Google’s instant search box, there is data from Google+ because Steve is in one of my Circles. It also has a couple of search result hits, one from Google+ and another that Steve might have shared on Google+. Those extra’s don’t show up in Safari’s Private browsing search results.
It’s interesting however, that in both results, Google knew my location. I took a closer look at that value by clicking on “Change Location”, then clicking on “Auto-detected.” The resulting page describes how they get location from an IP Address. There isn’t much you can do about that other than spoof your address or use a Proxy Server.
I may be wrong here and with Steve being the security expert, I wonder if there are any repercussions from just opening a “Private” browsing window separate from what you normally use and search Google with that window instead of a normal browsing window…
