Google personalizes search results even when you’re logged out, new study finds A study, albeit from competitor DuckDuckGo, finds that Google search results can vary significantly December 4, 2018 https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/4/...-personalized-unique-duckduckgo-filter-bubble
Damn, even when completely logged out of Google Account and in incognito (private browsing) mode Im considering dumping google as my search engine But then again, duckduckgo is a competitor to google, so who knows how true is their study. Still, it must be at least somewhat correct Maybe I'll do some testing, when I'm searching something, from now on I'll search in both google and duckduckgo and see what the differences are
Huh. I have no Google accounts. And I don't save any cookies between browser sessions. And I see no ads. But still, I wonder if Google is trying to optimize search results for me. But then, I've switched 100% to https://searx.me/ so hey
Gosh...people still don't understand that the so called private browsing mode is nothing more than trying to hide your surfing from your spouse, co-workers etc...And not very good even in that.
I like how you assumed that I thought that The study also shows what you said: This is why reducing fingerprinting as much as possible can be important
Strictly speaking, yes. However, there's a set of properties that get set when you select "Always use private browsing mode". You could probably configure them all individually, but it's just easier to with that. Tor browser comes with that set by default. And I suspect that it was originally backported to Firefox. As have other privacy and security features.
I have to check how Tor has augmented the mode, but the vanilla private browsing mode in most other browsers just "tries" to keep browser history from being able to digged out and ditto for cache and cookies. And that's about all, more or less. Of course it's good to have but it's far from perfect. There was few studies from past years that there was still traces left and any browser extensions could, if they wanted to, just basically show middle finger to the setting and store their own stuff however they pleased to disk. It's little like in the old days, when Internet Explorer was dominant and Firefox was still at coming, you tried to keep your stuff hidden, deleted cache, cookies, history, the works....then only to find out that the damn browser recorder everything to index.dat for "performance" reasons .... (I wonder if any of those sqlite files that FF uses do the same?)
I guess. But for me, each persona has its own VM, at least. Except for some personas that have their own personas, where I'm intentionally lazy. So private browsing is just a casual tweak.
Ditched google search years ago and I'm not sorry. Haven't tried searx.me. Good to spread searches across different SE's I think.
Maybe Google is split testing to improve the SERP. That would be a plausible excuse. It's actually true to some extent.
Looks like Searx.me has Google SE, Google images, Youtube, Google news, Google scholar and Google videos on by default.
https://searx.me/about Default engines: wikipedia bing currency wikidata google dictzone https://searx.me/preferences
Unfortunately so far from my testing, duckduckgo is quite a decent amount slower than google. Typing the exact same term in the address bar, google usually takes between 0.5-1 sec to load, measured with the ghostery extension which shows me page load time, while duckduckgo usually takes between 0.8-1.2 secs. That's a huge difference in perception for me. With duckduckgo, the template of the page appears as fast as google, but then there's that few hundred milliseconds where the search results are blank and then they appear, giving a "delayed" kind of feeling which is definitely off-putting to me. As someone who can easily notice the difference between 165hz and 144hz, those few hundred milliseconds are the difference between feeling everything is fast, and feeling the page is loading slowly