You might have already come across the fact that search engines like Google invade your privacy and track you. There are alternatives like DuckDuckGo, Startpage which focus heavily on honoring user privacy. Hulbee is a new name in the list with its servers located in Switzerland. Continue reading Hulbee: privacy-oriented search engine
Here’s a stylish way to flaunt your browser’s home page – Goosh. It’s an unofficial Google shell from where you access some of the Google services. There are several supported commands (with easy aliases) which you can use to fetch results. The results appear 4 at a time and you can fetch more if you want. The search result links open in a new browser tab.
List of supported commands (at the time of writing):
| command | aliases | parameters | function |
| web | (search,s,w) | [keywords] | google web search |
| ls | [command] | lists commands | |
| wiki | (wikipedia) | [keywords] | wikipedia search |
| site | (in) | <url> <keywords> | search in a specific website |
| read | (rss,r) | <url> | read feed of url |
| clear | (c) | clear the screen | |
| amazon | (am) | [keywords] | amazon search |
| settings | (set) | [name] [value] | edit settings |
| feeds | (feed,f) | [keywords] | google feed search |
| help | (man,h,?) | [command] | displays help text |
| more | (m) | get more results | |
| lucky | (l) | [keywords] | go directly to first result |
| calculate | (calc) | [mathematical expression] | evaluate a mathematical expression |
| go | (g) | <url> | open url |
| open | (o) | <url> | open url in new window |
| blogs | (blog,b) | [keywords] | google blog search |
| news | (n) | [keywords] | google news search |
| cd | <command> | change mode | |
| addengine | add goosh to firefox search box | ||
| load | <extension_url> | load an extension |
– Enter green commands without parameters to change default mode.
– Anything that’s not a command will search in current default mode.
– Aliases will expand to commands. Numbers will expand to corresponding search results.
– Use cursor up and down for command history.
– Enter keyword and hit the tab-key for tab-completion.
– Commands marked with * are experimental, use them with care and please report any bugs.
Here’s an example custom search:
guest@goosh.org:/web> s "cli tools" site:tuxdiary.com
Fetch more results:
guest@goosh.org:/web> m
To add Goosh search to your browser, run:
guest@goosh.org:/web> addengine
Webpage: Goosh
______ _ _ ______ _______ ______ _______ _ _ _
/ _____)(_) (_)(_____ \ (_______)(_____ \ (_______)(_)(_)(_)
( (____ _ _ _____) ) _____ _____) ) _______ _ _ _
\____ \ | | | || __ / | ___) | __ / | ___ || || || |
_____) )| |___| || | \ \ | | | | \ \ | | | || || || |
(______/ \_____/ |_| |_||_| |_| |_||_| |_| \_____/
You might have heard the allegations about search giants recording your data or tracking it. And you might have heard about Julian Assange. Would it be surprising to know that Assange wrote a cmdline perl based tool to search Google (and many other web services) at lightning speed… a tool sans the tracking? I guess not.
Such a tool exists, written in 2000. It’s Surfraw.
Each supported search engine or database (like Google, Wikipedia, Slashdot etc.) is called an elvi in Surflaw, apparently as a tribute to Elvis (Ref: Wikipedia).
$ surfraw -elvi
<Tab>To install Surfraw on Ubuntu, run:
$ sudo apt-get install surfraw surfraw-extra
The user-specific configuration file is ~/.surfraw.conf. The syntax is simple – defyn is used for boolean configuration variables, def for all others. Example configuration:
def SURFRAW_text_browser /usr/bin/lynx defyn SURFRAW_graphical yes def SURFRAW_graphical_browser firefox def SURFRAW_results 10 def SURFRAW_lang uk
Surfraw has many options, many of them specific to the elvi (search service). If you do not want to type surfraw all the time, sue the alias sr.
sr elviname [options] search terms..
$ sr google -results=100 foo "bar baz" bam
$ sr wikipedia surfraw
$ sr austlii -method=phrase dog like
$ surfraw rhyme Julian
$ sr rfc s/mime
$ sr translate logiciel
Webpage: Surfraw (with love, from Julian Assange)
Privacy Badger is a new browser extension being developed by EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) to protect your online privacy. Privacy Badger blocks spying ads and invisible trackers. It’s there to ensure that companies can’t track your browsing without your consent.
While there are tools like Disconnect which also do the job well Privacy Badger gives you a clearer view of which trackers are trying to track you. It also allows you more control on dealing with the trackers.
Privacy Badger sends a Do Not Track header with each request and when it finds that the request is not being honored, it automatically blocks any requests being sent to the domain. Each tracker is denoted by 3 suggestive states: GREEN (unblocked), YELLOW (do not send cookies or referrers) and RED (block). You can change the state manually too. Advertisers and other third-party domains can unblock themselves in Privacy Badger by making a strong commitment to respect Do Not Track requests. By including this mechanism, Privacy Badger not only protects users who install it, but actually provides incentives for better privacy practices across the entire Web.
It is still in an Alpha stage as we write and needs more testing. We encourage readers to try it out and send feedback or bug reports. Currently it supports Firefox and Google Chrome.
Similar extension for Firefox – Ghostery.
Webpage: Privacy Badger
Disconnect is a browser plugin which enhances your online privacy by blocking invisible tracking websites. It has an intuitive interface and can also show you the count of blocked trackers. The number can be overwhelming sometimes, e.g. opening the Yahoo! homepage shows 45 trackers blocked! It saves your bandwidth and reduces the number of your online footprints. The types of trackers it can detect and block are Ads, Analytics, Social and Content. Works on Firefox and Google Chrome.
Disconnect Search is a Beta plugin which lets you search privately without being tracked. Currently it supports Google, Bing, Yahoo, Blekko and DuckDuckGo. It can also integrate itself to the omnibox (address bar) search or search from anywhere (now a Beta feature). It anonymizes your search terms from search engines, resulting websites and ISPs. An alternative to this plugin is to use Startpage as your default search engine.
Webpage: Disconnect, Disconnect Search
[Courtesy: Jester Raiin]
I was surprised to find Startpage as the default search engine in the Tor browser. I understood the reasons when I clicked on the Privacy policy page. Unlike Google, which according to its latest agreement with users considers search results from users and their usage data as Google’s property, Startpage never saves any of your data. But it gives the same results as Google! How you ask? It uses its own Proxy to filter the Google search results when you enter any keyword. So you get just what you want – only the search results and no invasion of your privacy by Google. Continue reading Startpage: Google search with privacy