[kwlug-disc] Search engine that actually searches for strings

[Doug Moen]

If only using incognito mode prevented google from tracking you. You have to disable google telemetry and analytics in all of your internet traffic. If you never communicate with a google server then it can't profile you.

On my laptop, although I use ublock origin and use ungoogled chromium as my backup browser, google still has a profile of me due to the fact that I watch youtube videos in the web browser via youtube.com. I would need to start using an anonymous youtube proxy, or consistently use Tor Browser for viewing youtube videos. Simply using a VPN and an ordinary browser isn't enough, because Google will still fingerprint your browser. Tor Browser has decent fingerprinting protection, as long as you follow the instructions on things you must never do in Tor Browser that would destroy your anonymity, such as log in to a website or installing an extension. Update: youtube isn't working for me in Tor, I remember it used to work, but maybe Google is cracking down now.

Privacy is almost impossible on the mainstream (non-indy) web right now. I expect it will be completely impossible once Google finishes implementing their web browser DRM idea, in which all mainstream web sites will use a google API to cryptographically verify that you are running an unmodified version of Chrome with no extensions that Google disapproves of. This is necessary of course for security reasons, to protect users.

Doug.

On Thu, Sep 21, 2023, at 6:23 PM, Chris Frey wrote:
> So we need to do all our creative searches in Incognito mode :-)
>
> - Chris
>
> On Thu, Sep 21, 2023 at 05:18:19PM -0400, Doug Moen wrote:
>> I tried this search in Google, and I got the same quality of results as from Kagi.com, in that all of the results contained "verbum". I recently read a forum thread about the fact that Google no longer consistently honours quoted keywords unless you turn on the "verbatim" mode that is accessed using Tools >> All Results >> Verbatim. But in the search I did, Verbatim wasn't necessary. Everybody gets different results from the same Google search due to the results being conditioned by the profile that Google constructs for you, even if you aren't logged in. Since I don't normally use Google services, and use a lot of tech to prevent Google from constructing a profile for me, maybe that made a difference in my search outcome?
>> 
>> On Wed, Sep 20, 2023, at 11:19 PM, Paul Nijjar via kwlug-disc wrote:
>> > I don't know what happened to search engines, but they are getting
>> > worse and worse and I am getting more and more annoyed.
>> >
>> > wordpress.com recently changed its comment form. You used to be able
>> > to enter in an email and name without Javascript, and you could submit
>> > a comment. Now they have changed to something that uses the string
>> > "verbum" in its class names. I want to know what this is so I can turn
>> > it off. So I search for something like
>> >
>> > wordpress.com comment form "verbum" -bible
>> >
>> > (since there is some bible site that pollutes the results).
>> >
>> > When I search on DuckDuckGo or Google or Bing, none of the search
>> > results contain the string "verbum", even though in all three putting
>> > the terms in scare quotes is supposed to search for the exact phrase.
>> > This happens all the time. I try to search for exact strings and get
>> > nonsense. I am so tired of it. Is there a search engine I can use that
>> > will actually find pages containing the strings I am searching for? If
>> > so what is it?
>> >
>> > - Paul
>> >
>> >
>> > -- 
>> > Events: https://feeds.off-topic.kwlug.org 
>> > Housing: https://unionsd.coop
>> > Blog: http://pnijjar.freeshell.org
>> >
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