Most search engines, when someone uses them to find what they need, track that search for statistical and advertising purposes. In practice Google, Bing and Yahoo track the searches made by creating user profiles in order to correlate the terms and know which are the most searched terms.
Due to the various scandals of Datagate and PRISM, which have revealed how national governments can have access to all the information exchanged on the internet by users, we have seen how some search engines such as DuckDuckGo or StartPage have gained popularity because they do not track searches .
The two search engines mentioned take the search results from Bing or Google, personalize them and show them to users without the possibility for external companies to be able to know details about these searches.
A similar principle is that used by Disconnect Search which acts as a proxy (a link) between the computer and the Google and Bing search engines, providing identical search results, but without tracking.
Disconnect blocks every site that silently controls what the user is looking for to collect data that can be used for advertising purposes.
Disconnect Search is an extension for Chrome and Firefox that adds an access and configuration button on the browser toolbar.
Pressing the icon opens a box where you can immediately search using the search engines Google, Bing, Yahoo, Blekko or DuckDuckGo .
At the bottom of the box there is the option, activated by default, which allows you to search with Disconnect Search also from the omnibox, that is from the browser's address bar.
In this way, every search made is filtered by the extension and Google (or another search engine) is prevented from tracking and recording the search query used.
In the extension box there is also a second option that can be enabled: search from everywhere .
This allows you to use Disconnect as a search proxy on each site, i.e. also by searching directly from the Google.it, Google.com or Bing.com sites.
With these methods you can therefore search safely and privately without changing our habits, as was done before.
The purpose of Disconnect Search is to prevent the sending of search queries to websites that are loaded from the results page and uses encryption to protect searches from your ISP or network monitoring programs.
What you can't do is use a personalized or national search engine, so the results will come from Google.com in Italian and not from Google.it.
The extension for now only available for Google Chrome and Firefox will perhaps also soon be available on Internet Explorer and Opera and can be installed from the official website .
One might wonder if the company behind Disconnect collects user data; it would be absurd if he did and on the site it is clearly written that no data is recorded.
The video below clearly explains why, for some, it can be important to keep internet searches private and untracked.
However, this extension is not essential and there are many other ways:
- Click-tracking privacy for Google, Facebook and Youtube searches
- Do not be tracked online by sites by blocking the collection of personal data
