Some stink is being made about Google’s retention and tracking of search data. A director at Mozilla has even claimed that Microsoft has better privacy practices, and he recommends users change their default web search to Bing.
Allow me to introduce Startpage:
Startpage claims no retention of user search data, and you have the option to use HTTPS (secure/encrypted) connections to further protect yourself. Startpage uses an aggregate search from various engines, kind of like Dogpile, and gives pretty good results.
You’ll probably want to click the “my settings” link on the front page to customize the output a bit, most notably to enable the “Secure Socket Layer (SSL) / HTTPS” setting. If you choose to “add startpage to your browser”, also make sure to check the “Use HTTPS” box.
If you’re using an unsupported browser, you can manually set up Startpage with the following URL string:
https://startpage.com/do/metasearch.pl?cat=web&query=%s
Note that some browsers want a different variable for the search string, so you might have to replace the “%s” with another string of text.
Give it a try, and let me know what you think.
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