How to get rid of search engine that monitors your activities

Posted in Tricks

Friday, December 6, 2013 By Unknown

Disconnect, a startup co-founded by a former Google engineer, is fast becoming a darling of privacy advocates — and a potential headache for marketers and search engines. This week, the firm launched a free service that thwarts Google, Bing and the rest of them from logging what you search and, says the company, demand is brisk.

Disconnect says that, two days in, it has received 250,000 queries and that it had “the most successful first day ever for a standalone search product.” It’s still early, of course, but the initial reception for Disconnect Search suggests pent-up demand for easy-to-use privacy products — and a possible long-term threat to Google and the online ad economy.

Search without leaving a trace

Disconnect, which started in 2010 as a widget to block Facebook tracking, already offers an easy way to see and prevent online ad and research firms from siphoning your data as you browse the web. This week, the company expanded its offerings to include Disconnect Search, which it built with the help of a former NSA engineer.The new product works like this:

A user clicks once to install Disconnect Search , and the tool appears as a small icon on her Chrome or Firefox browser frame:

Once Disconnect Search is installed, the user can specify her preferred search engine, and search like normal in the browser bar (in the case of Chrome) or the little toolbar (for Firebox). Or she can use Disconnect’s own dropdown bar, which looks like this:

Once Disconnect Search is installed, the search experience is the same — the user sees the same set of search results as she normally would (though they come up just a mite slower).

Watch a video :