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Mozilla Exec Urges Switch From Google To Bing
Andorin writes "Asa Dotzler, Mozilla's director of community development, has published a brief blog post in which he recommends that Firefox users move from using Google as their main search engine to Bing, citing privacy issues. Disregarding the existence of alternative search engines such as Ask and Yahoo, Dotzler asserts that Bing's privacy policy is better than Google's. Dotzler explains the recommendation with a quote from Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google: 'If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place. If you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines — including Google — do retain this information for some time...' Ars Technica also covers the story."
I actually applaud Firefox for this change.
What change? They didn't change anything.
Marketing companies shouldn't just fuck everyone in the ass for their own gain.
You know Microsoft's privacy policy isn't all that better. They still associate your search with your name and ip address for 18 months after you searched. 'Fuck everyone in the ass for their own gain' is a bit of a hyperbole, wouldn't you say?
Clusty is by far the best search engine. I don't understand why more people are not using it.
Google has been pissing me off recently with their toolbar updates that change the behaviour of the browser. If I wanted the new window/tab functionality of Firefox to behave like Safari, I'd be using Safari. Why do I want the sidewiki thing, or whatever it's called? Etc, etc. Piss off: I got the google toolbar as better way of searching for things, along with find in page option when I have the results. So it gets uninstalled.
It surprises me that when there are discussions about search engine privacy, Cuil never seems to be mentioned. Or at least I do not see it.
On Cuil's privacy page it says:
"When you search with Cuil, we do not keep any personally identifiable information, period. Your search history is your business."
So is there some reason Cuil is not brought up more? Maybe there are resons not to use it that I do not know about. Or perhaps it is just not well known.
Don't you understand the concept of asymmetric encryption? I don't have to send my key via a secure channel. I can post my public key in this post for anyone to see.
Anyone who wants to send me a message, will encrypt it with my publicly available key and it will only be possible to decrypt it using my private key. That's the "magic" my web-browser/email software/etc has that the hacker's programs don't have.
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I find that Bing falls for marketing scams and SEO much worse than Firefox. Random download sites and outright scams show up in Bing first with lots of searches, while Google is much more successful at ignoring marketingese and just giving you the site you want.
For example, searching for Wii homebrew gives:
Google:
Bing:
So basically, people looking for Wii homebrew and using Bing are at a much higher chance of getting scammed. Seriously, Wiibrew isn't even in the first page of results.
Going the other way, searching for the name of the scam (homebreware) yields (antiscam = site that explains that homebreware is a scam): ...
Google: antiscam, antiscam, antiscam, scam, scam, antiscam, scam,
Bing: scam, scam, scam, scam, scam, scam, scam...
Someone using Bing and doublechecking on what they're about to buy isn't going to remotely realize they're being scammed.
You speak as if searching anonymously were a simple matter of not logging in. The fact is, you have no real way of knowing where any given search engine may be following you. Between cookies, redirect links, ip address tracking through ads or other inline links on 3rd party sites, search content analysis (as with the "anonymized" searches leaked by AOL a few years back)... there is a real question whether anonymous web use is possible at all, a question which nobody can answer definitively since new analysis techniques are discovered all the time.