A better search engine

Don’t stop reading; you probably actually do care about your search engine, but don’t know that you should.  First, give duckduckgo a try as your search engine.  The whole premise behind duckduckgo is that they don’t track your searches or filter your data based on past searches.  Be sure to check out their bank (!) syntax; it is pretty handy.  If you’re lazy like me, just give it a try and see if you like it.  If you’re more interested, read on

Why you should care

Privacy

Google, Bing and others have this “nice” feature where they send your search terms, location, browser information and other details to a site when you click on a link from their search page.  With enough searching and enough sites tracking you, you’re identity isn’t secret anymore.  Here’s a blurb from WSJ about how insurance companies are thinking of using the data.

Insurers have long used blood and urine tests to assess people’s health—a costly process. Today, however, data-gathering companies have such extensive files on most U.S. consumers—online shopping details, catalog purchases, magazine subscriptions, leisure activities and information from social-networking sites—that some insurers are exploring whether data can reveal nearly as much about a person as a lab analysis of their bodily fluids

I’m not a big conspiracy person, but I don’t trust folks at Google to take care of my information.  Besides, any organization that hires Eric Schmidt shouldn’t be trusted; he’s a snake.  There’s just something creepy about him.

Here’s duckduckgo’s presentation on the subject.

Filtering your data

Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filter_bubble

While I’m sure we have vast political differences, this is a good presentation on the “filter bubble”.   There’s a fair amount of disagreement on his views, but it is interesting to listen to his hypothesis.

Here’s duckduckgo’s take on it, dontbubble.us.