As disturbing, funny, and nutty some searches are one thing is pretty clear — people ran them in private. Or thought they did anyway. More disturbing is that the entire web is now reading about them, blogging them, doing news stories on them. So much for privacy.
Luckily, you can go a long way to keeping your secret searches safe. Here’s a few tools that will help:
Lost In The CrowdThis site allows you to search your favorite engines while automatically mixing your searches with a large number of other searches essentially creating “search noise”. The idea is that that your sexy/sneaky/sick searches will be harder to find and appear less prominent if they are found. Nice that it works with any browser and all major engines.
TrackMeNot FireFox ExtentionThis extention does pretty much the same thing as Lost In The Crowd. One bit that TrackMeNot has over Lost In The Crowd is that you can add your own list of keywords for the autogenerated searches to be created from which should add a little more safety.
TorCreates a network of onion proxies allowing all data (not just searches) to flow through what is essentially an anonymous peer to peer network. I’m not the most techy guy in the world so if that description doesn’t do it for you here’s a great overview of how Tor works (scroll down a bit to the pics). Appears to be the most robust solution, but a bit complicated for people like me.
FoxyProxy FireFox ExtentionThis extention can be configured to use a multiple proxies to help keep everything you do online (including your searches) do anonymous. Works with Tor out of the box.
Don’t Leave Traces FireFox/Greasemonkey ExtentionThis new one is similar to FoxyProxy although a little more simplistic since it uses only one proxy and works for searches only. Easy add though if you already use Greasemonkey.
Use a Web-Based ProxyThere are 100s of free proxies out there that you can use to surf the web. Most should give you some level of anonymity and work in any browser, but be careful since you never know who is running the proxy!
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