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in reply to Re^3: Sometimes Perl is awesome: Duck Duck Go edition
in thread Sometimes Perl is awesome: Duck Duck Go edition

DDG will get me Google's results, with all the no-tracking goodness.

DDG just redirects you to Google where Google is free to, and certainly does, track you in any ways they see fit.

- tye        

  • Comment on Re^4: Sometimes Perl is awesome: Duck Duck Go edition (!g tracking)

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Re^5: Sometimes Perl is awesome: Duck Duck Go edition (!g tracking)
by PrakashK (Pilgrim) on Feb 14, 2012 at 18:44 UTC

    You are quite right about the redirecting to Google. The redirection is, however, done by the HTTP Refresh header, rather than via the more common 3xx HTTP Status code.

    However, Google does not seem to tie the search request to me, at least looking at the search results page. When I am logged in to Google+, I performed a search directly on Google. The results page showed that Google took my online presence into account, as evidenced by the google-bar with my name, and results from Google+ circles etc. I see 8 cookies from google.com and 14 cookies from plus.google.com.

    Repeating the same search via DDG !g syntax, while still logged in to Google+, I see a different page, with the google-bar asking me to sign in, and generic results from Google+. So, in this case, Google did not associate the search request to my Google account. Also, I see only 8 cookies and no cookies from plus.google.com.

    This is what I meant by "no-tracking" (poor choice of words, I admit).

    It is possible that Google could derive some kind of link to me by IP tracking or other means, but they do not seem to be doing it.

[reply]

      I don't know how you pull that off. If I'm logged in to google (gmail, in my test case), then using a "!g" search via duckduckgo takes me to google and google shows me as logged in on that page of search results.

      There are lots of variables possible here. The "!g" search takes me to https://encrypted.google.com/ (which might vary based on whether using the http vs https and/or html vs javascript interfaces of duckduckgo). Maybe 'plus' is different from 'gmail' (vs. several other ways to log in to google).

      But thanks at least for the information that there is at least one way to search via google w/o google appearing to notice that you are logged in. The existence of such quite surprises me.

      - tye        

[reply]

        I was earlier using the DDG search engine for Firefox searchbar, which is using the non-https URL. So, I manually visited the https version of DDG and repeated my searches, while logged in to Google+ ($work allows G+, but not gmail; go figure!). I also disabled Adblock Plus, for good measure.

        I was now redirected to https://encrypted.google.com, but the results were same as earlier.

[reply]

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