Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

I don't think these reasons are so strong. If you're not signed into Google, you don't need to worry about tracking. And you can turn off personalized results: https://www.google.com/preferences. The Bang sytax is usually worse than doing a Google site search, since Google usually does a better job ranking a site's content than the website itself.


Turning off personalized results doesn't stop Google from tracking you, it just stops leveraging that tracking for your benefit.

And I misspoke about the bang syntax: it actually runs a search on the target website. If you search for "foobar !g" on DDG, it redirects you to this page: https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=foobar. Same as "kitten video !yt" redirs to https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=kitten%20video.

edit: I misread your comment about goog's site search indexing vs a site's native search. That is entirely site dependent. And it's still only a "kitten videos site:youtube.com !g" away in DDG.


I would bet money that Google "anonymously" tracks you regardless of whether you're logged in or not. And by anonymous, that's only until someone data mines the dozens of searches you do per day.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: