Slashdot Mirror

Oh and BTW I don't see any ads at all in my GMail.

What about CustomizeGoogle for firefox? http://www.customizegoogle.com/ The privacy tab you can force your google cookie UID to be anonymous. And prevent cookies from being sent to google analytics.

For the paranoids I'd recommend the CustomizeGoogle firefox extension - among other things (like removing those pesky ads) it can reduce the ability for Google to track what you are doing.

Experts exchange does something almost as bad as huge flashing graphical ads: they show up in google searches for programming questions.
 
They don't have to. Get http://www.customizegoogle.com/ (yes, another Firefox extension) and tell it to filter Experts Exchange from your search results.

Or, if you're using Firefox you could just install the CustomizeGoogle Add-on which has options for anonymity.

http://www.customizegoogle.com/

You can mostly protect yourself from this if you use Google and a few simple tips:

1. If you have a Google account, make sure to disable search history and clear your previous searches. Also only login when necessary, not for general surfing.
2. If you get use Firefox get the CustomizeGoogle extension, it allows you to disable Google click tracking and also the Google Cookie (along with a bunch of other nice options like ad removal).

This still won't protect you from your local browser history on your computer, or from your own IP address, you can use a proxy to help conceal your IP from Google, and clearing your local history is easy enough. It really depends on how paranoid you are as to how extensively you wish to cover your tracks.

Finally, another choice is to use the Scroogle Scraper for your general searches, which is basically a totally anonymous Google-front end without Google ads.

Firefox has an extension called customizegoogle. It adds a 'filter' option to a google results page. Allows one to filter out the sneaky pages that hi-jack your search query.

Ignore that post above - I'm a moron. I meant to say CustomizeGoogle Firefox plugin .Get it here.

I guess that's what happens when you Slashdot before caffeine. I'm sorry.

Though you probably already know this, Customise Google will block google-analytics for you, or perhaps you can just edit your hosts file.

Or, you could use this firefox extension and get rid of them for free.

Firefox is okay but it still crashes when I try to view certain types of videos online. Especially in the quicktime and wmv formats.

I'd probably be using another browser if it wasn't for the CustomizeGoogle add-on. Since I'm using Google and gmail you can't believe how happy this makes me.

http://www.customizegoogle.com/

https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/743/
http://www.customizegoogle.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CustomizeGoogle

I use it as well. It is WONDERFUL. (If you install it; check the options - TONS of hidden not-default-enabled options)

Recently learned of this Ff extension (here or digg or lxer, looks like it's been around for a while). Supposed to anonymize your cookie and block data to G. Analytics and all that. I just like not seeing those useless ads and that it puts up links to other search engines. Also, you can filter out websites (bye bye Experts Exchange).

Use Customize Google:

Customize Google For Internet Explorer
Customize Google For FireFox
Both will anonymize your google cookie, click tracking and much more.
Both are free open source projects.

I'm pretty sure that http://www.customizegoogle.com/ will do what you want.

We've got CustomizeGoogle, so I'm sure someone will come up with a CustomizeEbay. Now, if they just came up with a way to wash these contextual ads off normal Web sites...

They're really easy to block if you use the right tool. Things like Adblock work for the old-school type of image ads, but that style is slowly being phased out.

For google specifically there is the CustomizeGoogle Fx extension which makes it very simple to remove all text ads across all the google sites.

A more general-purpose tool is the (seemingly little-known) Remove it Permanently (RIP). This lets you specify things to be removed with XPATH queries. If you don't know XPATH you can just right click on any element on the page and choose "Remove permanently" and it will construct an XPATH for that particular object. But the real fun starts when you start making your own XPATH rules. For example, if a page had their text ads in a DIV with ID "textads" you just specify

//div[@id='textads']

Or maybe you want to remove one of the skyscraper things:

//table[@width='700' and @height='80']

The one I use for the nytimes site is:

//div[@id='bColumn' or @id='adxCircBottom' or @id='adxSponLink' or @id='adxLeaderBoard']

These are still really trivial XPATH examples, you can really get extremely sophisticated with it. The point is that it is rather quick and easy to do this, especially when you combine this with the DOM inspector and the Inspect This extension (which allows you to right click on the undesired element and go right to it in the DOM inspector.)

Using these tools you can easily block any part of the page with surgical accuracy, without having to know javascript or search for a Greasemonkey script.

I know that http://www.customizegoogle.com/ does this currently for Gmail, probably will be added soon.

You can have many of these fine features with Google as well, using Firefox extensions such as GooglePreview, CustomizeGoogle, and LookAhead. You can even jump over and search ask.com (and many others) with one extra click, if you wanna.

Just saying.

I don't know of any adblocker -- certainly not the ones that I use -- that block text based ads. In fact, if I had the option to block Google-style ads, I probably wouldn't turn it on
 
  This does just exactly that. So now you've seen one....

Customize Google does that and a lot more.

Google has never moved past the leech stage, they dice up content sucked from anywhere they can find it. Their ads are spam. The user did not ask for them; GOOG gets paid for them. The Anti-leech http://www.customizegoogle.com/

Slashdot has never moved past the leech stage, they dice up content sucked from anywhere they can find it. Their ads are spam. The user did not ask for them; Slashdot gets paid for them. The Anti-leech http://www.customizeslashdot.com/

Google has never moved past the leech stage, they dice up content sucked from anywhere they can find it. Their ads are spam. The user did not ask for them; GOOG gets paid for them. The Anti-leech http://www.customizegoogle.com/

If you are using firefox, then there is an extension to customize your interaction with google. One of the preference sections is privacy settings. Options include anonymizing your user ID and never sending cookie data to google analytics.
labnol.blogspot.com has an article that discusses both of these options and also discusses how to add the hosts entry on a windows box.

There will be no banner ads on the Google homepage or web search results pages. There will not be crazy, flashy, graphical doodads flying and popping up all over the Google site. Ever.

The Firefox plugin at http://www.customizegoogle.com/ has various options, including filtering out specified domains from all searches, removing ads and adding site thumbnails...

Better yet: CustomizeGoogle

http://www.customizegoogle.com/

I have yet to see a Google ad that is relevant to what I would like to see. And, I'm afraid that they already wasted their chance.

So... what ads
http://adblock.mozdev.org/
are
zone "googlesyndication.com" {type master;allow-query {any;};file "/etc/bind/db.blackhole";};
you
apt-get install adzapper
talking
http://www.customizegoogle.com/
about?

I don't ever pay for random software -- I buy only things I need to (because @#$%^& customers won't switch to usable systems), and I sometimes help with Free Software projects (donating code, not money). For non-software related things, the banking system in Poland is so abysmal that purchasing material things online is simply out of the question; also, I have a strong negative response to ads -- I make conscious decisions to boycott products that are advertised in an annoying way.

Losing the clicks from the rest of the company I happen to admin the servers for is just collateral damage.

permit cookies has an update. right at the top of the page you linked :)
ditto add bookmark here, and FLST.
(possibly not compatible with ff1.07 hence not default/automatic?)

why are you using cookie toggle when you already have permit cookies?

bookmark all is redundant; part of ff1.5 default menu options (ctrl-shft-D). try Openbook (http://www.chuonthis.com/extensions/openbook.php) for better bookmark dialog options.

gcache looks dead. maybe you can find a bookmarklet replacement. or you can use CustomizeGoogle extension (http://www.customizegoogle.com/) which can add WaybackMachine links to each google result.

stumbleupon looks compatible. recheck.

securepasswordgenerator is possibly redundant as roboform says it does that?

good luck with the rest. check the dev forums for each. sometimes the authors havent got autoupdates working properly and you have to manually install latest ver. yourself.

Are there adverts on the internet then? WTF...

True enough though, for a while I couldn't be bothered to filter Google's ads. Nowadays I find RIP and CustomizeGoogle keep the interface nice and clean.

Useful links for those that like to make their own mind up:

http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/
http://www.customizegoogle.com/
http://rip.mozdev.org/index.html
http://adblock.mozdev.org/
http://www.pierceive.com/

And for those that might bleat "without advertising, many sites would fail" I say Good. Let those sites fail. Give me micropayments and an honest relationship.

Sadly, my bookmark is www.google.com/ig for the customized homepage, so unless there's a Firefox mod which captures that and redirects it then I'm stuck with manual intervention.

The CustomizeGoogle plugin does just what you want.

[RECOMMENDED]
[f + t + m] - conquery (context-menu searches) + mycroft plugins
[f] - openbook
[f + m] - optimoz: tweaks (sidebar autopopout)
[f] - translate

[OPTIONAL]
[f] - autohide & tbx for better fullscreen
[f + t + m] - chromedit
[f] - copyurlplus
[f] - customize google
[f] - extended statusbar
[f + m] - image zoom
[f] - keyconfig
[f + m] - launchy
[f + t + m] - optimoz: mouse gestures
[f + m] - paste and go
[f] - permit cookies
[f + t + m] - preferential
[f] - target alert
[opt] - calendar

dozens more extensions available here: Update.Mozilla.Org and Extension Room and Pike's and Roachfiend and Extensions Mirror

CustomizeGoogle (http://www.customizegoogle.com/) is a a GPL'd FireFox extension. It wasn't written by Google and Im pretty sure Google doesn't like it too much since it removes advertisements and adds links to competitors sites to name a few things...

It's an interesting idea... but is slashdot or information the feature itself blocked by their Cisco-backed filter?

- Use Adblock and CustomizeGoogle (removes all Google ads) to block ads on Firefox
- Use the hosts file to block them on MSIE and Opera (a bit ugly but works)

AdBlock: www.mozilla.org > Products > Firefox > Extensions
CustomizeGoogle: http://www.customizegoogle.com/
The hosts file: http://mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.htm

Links to said Mozilla/Firefox extensions:

AdBlock Plus
BugMeNot
CustomizeGoogle
DictionarySearch
Farkit
Gmail Notifier
Nuke Anything
Plain Text Links
Switch Proxy Tool
Greasemonkey

Should have been obvious ... it's the "CustomizeGoogle" extension;

http://www.customizegoogle.com/

Just disabling it seems to fix the problem. It's a great extension, but I'll have to do without it if I'm going to use it.

Here's the cure for their business model:
http://www.customizegoogle.com/

# uses Google Suggest when you search
# adds links to competitors ("Try your search on Yahoo...")
# rewrites links to point straight to the images in Google Images
# removes image copying restrictions in Google Print
# secures Gmail, switches to https
# anonymize your Google userid (disabled by default)
# removes ads (disabled by default)
# adds a result counter in search result (disabled by default)
# filters spammy websites from search results
# add link to WayBack Machine (webpage history) NEW
# 10 locales: en-US, it-IT, sv-SE, de-DE, tr-TR, ja-JP, es-ES, es-AR, nl-NL, nl-BE NEW

My favorite - the ability to remove certain Google search results, bases on their URL. Gets ride of those sites that I know require a subscription.

You mean like this?