You’d be shocked and amazed if you knew what they’re searching for..
I run one of the many YaCy P2P search portals out there. YaCy is a distributed P2P search-engine, if you run a node then you can search using the global index of all the nodes. Most people run their own node on their own desktop’s and don’t make it publicly available, I run a public search service which allows anyone to use the YaCy network.
YaCy has a nice “feature” called Search Statistics. It gives you a nice list of the latest search keywords - and the hosts used to search. This makes it very easy to follow the same user’s searches for many searches in a row. It doesn’t use cookies, which makes tracking over time impossible, but that is something most search engines do.
Regardless. Only seeing even one or three searches in a row at YacySearch actually gives quite a lot of information about the person doing the search. And it also may tell you way to much, some of the strings some people search for are just.. sick. Or very strange.
I would actually prefer to turn this search-logging “feature” off and not be able to view it at all, because those few times I look at the “What are people searching for today?“-list I almost always get.. kind of upset at just how .. how do I put it.. sick? some people are. But it does give some interesting information, too, like if there has been some story in the mainstream press about some celeberty then suddenly everybody’s searching for that celeb’s name..
Anyway. Here’s a word of advice for you all about searching on the Internet:
1) Clear your cookies every time you close your browser (Firefox, and others, can be configured to do this automatically.
2) Use scrapers like Scroogle to search Yahoo (and Google).
3) Preferrably, use a anonymity system like Tor to browse the Internet.
4) Spread your searches between different search-engines. If MSN knows your last 100 searches then they probably know a whole lot about you. You’re better off doing 1 search at MSN, one search at Google, one search at Yahoo, and so on. This means that none of them get a complete history of your searches, and it’s way simpler to see what you’re up to when you’ve got 10 search-requests in a row or something like that…
5) Some browsers can give you “suggusted keywords” when you type in the search-box. Turn this off. It reports everything you type in the box back to a search-engine, even if you don’t actually search for anything. Worst case: You accidentially mispaste your computer password into the box, now it’s broadcasted accross the Internet to a search-engine…
Happy searching.
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