Google is losing control of its search engine. Scraping all the ads, as we do, makes the search results still fairly usable, and not so terrible, as you can see on the left side of the search results on Traceless.online.

Emilio Coppola laments the decline of Google, and the lack of a search engine that provides what we need today, much as Google originally provided it around the turn of the century. It will soon no longer work to append "site:reddit.com" to your searches, since only Google will index recent comments. That's the point of the agreement. So it really is a monopoly. It can throw around so much money that sites like Reddit are willing to enter into an agreement so that they can be indexed by only one search engine. That doesn't benefit the Internet, and it shouldn't be allowed. Even private search engines like Kagi won't be able to help with this. Coppola has no immediate solutions, but hopes that enough resourceful people will come up with a solution. Let's hope so.

So if you search on Google straight, right at their website, your search history and IP address are recorded, and they'll turn all that info to the government. You have been warned.

I tried this today, and sure enough, this is what you see:

Update (8/07/2024): Google admits that they have been censoring the autocomplete function on Trump.

Someone on Tildes thinks so. I haven't used DuckDuckGo in ages. I thought their search results were inferior to scraped Google. Others are using Kagi, but to me, search needs to be anonymous. I don't want to have search queries associataed with an account. It's just too personal.

I added the utm=14 to the Google side of Traceless.online and there doesn't seem to be any obvious differences in the results. For those who haven't heard, adding the parameter "udm=14" eliminates the AI feature that Google has implemented, which has deteriorated their search, as well as removing the Knowledge Panels, which may not be helpful. If all you want is a list of links, which is generally what I want, then the udm=14 parameter gets you that.

It's partly due to SEO machinations, as well as Google wanting to make money and trying different things.

Mario is right. Google is no longer an Internet utility company. It's now an activist organization. It's the fault of their younger hires, straight out of college. And their leadership was too timid to keep them under control. Google's goal is now to advance the agenda of the new hires. Really sad, because it didn't have to be this way. They certainly need a change from the top down.

I haven't been paying much attention to DuckDuckGo these days. Apparently, the author of this article thinks that DDG is stuck in the doldrums, trying to figure out what kind of company they are. DDG's search results have always been inferior to Google, and people only used them for the privacy concern. In 2024, getting good quality search results seems harder than ever. Brave is decent, and sometimes returns results better than Google. No one is bombing Brave with fake requests like they did Google-bombing, so they haven't had to drastically alter their algorithm. What Brave has seems to be good enough. Brave is totally independent of Google and Bing, while DDG gets results from Bing. Why didn't/doesn't DDG endeavor to develop their own search algorithm like Brave and Kagi? Perhaps, as the author says, search isn't really their main product now.

Another article on how using Google directly for searched can come back to bite you. Recently a judge declared it legal for Google to track when you visit a healthcare provider's webpage, such as looking for an abortion provider. Because the judge couldn't see any evidence that Google was using it for nefarious purposes. No, Google would never do something nefarious.

A small Nebraska company is helping law enforcement around the world spy on users of Google, Facebook and other tech giants. A secretly recorded presentation to police reveals how deeply embedded in the U.S. surveillance machine PenLink has become. PenLink might be the most pervasive wiretapper you’ve never heard of.

Users of the Mullvad VPN can use the Leta search engine, which operates essentially the same as Traceless.online. It is limited to 100 direct searches daily, and you will be getting content that has been cached for up to 30 days, so some of it might be out of date. They try to limit the number of searches to prevent overwhelming Google.

Phind.com is an easy front-end to access GPT4. It's as easy as using Google. No need to get an API key from OpenAI or set up an account or install anything. If you know how to use Google, you know how to use Phind.com. This site may find its servers overloaded pretty quickly.

Neeva aimed to be a better search engine than the standard, powered by A.I. However it was a paid product, and people like free. Or it least a paid service should be notably better than the best that's already out there. But now that every major search ending is using LLM-based search, they no longer have a distinguishing advantage. Was Neeva ever on your radar?
Update: Snowflake (a data cloud company) bought neeva. Wonder what they'll do with this.

Brave Search now has its own search index, and no longer uses Bing API calls. There's an option to continue having Google search results mixed in. Good to see an independent effort moving forward.

We've covered these before, especially Real-Time Bidding, and the provisiion of user data to data-brokers, who can do whatever they want with the data, as far as Google is concerned. Caveat emptor.

It was interesting to read that Mullvad now offers a search facility to its VPN customers. The search strategy works just like Traceless.Online. You enter your search query at the site, then they do the search for you, and send the results back to you.

DDG has joined the Chat bandwagon, and is rolling out a chat-based search feature, that spits out one search result, and the geeks aren't impressed. They're using OpenAI, which is owned by Microsoft, which needs to be considered in factoring in the reliability and bias of the search result delivered to you. As someone noted, all AI is doing so far is adding more noise, rather than providing good search. I think AI hasn't been fully developed, and it's being rolled out prematurely because every one else is doing it, and there is FOMO. For example, how you formulate the query makes a difference in what you get, and this has given rise to the need for "prompt engineers". And if a chat model has been trained for a certain property, it also gets easier to train the model for the opposite of that property, something described as the "Waluigi effect".

Yet another video pointing out that Google search isn't what it was in the past. It mentions the Reddit trick, which often works when you want product suggestions or recommendations, espcially regarding user experience/feedback. But Reddit users are a specific demographic, so this trick doesn't work for everything, such as restaurant recommendations, as you are likely to be recommended what college kids or thirty-somethings like.

But the video doesn't answer what comes next, because the answer isn't there yet. AI-powered search is still in its infancy, and makes too many mistakes. But perhaps in another few years, we'll search differently. I would still never search directly for sensitive information on my phone, where internet activity can be linked more closely to you specifically. Android phones have basically no privacy. And many privacy extensions used on the computer (like uMatrix) aren't available on iOS. Browser selection is limited, and the privacy extensions that are available are scant. Or you have to trust browsers made by Chinese developers.

Edit: The Economist comments on Google's dominance being threatened.

Official from the UN actually said that. They partnered with Google to skew the results you see regarding "climate change" so that you will only get "approved" search results. Another reason to look at more than just one search engine.
No, they don't pretend to hide it anymore.

Update: Brave is operational. I also made changes in the scraping protocol, as I was dissatisfied at the relatively fewer results pulled on that side. As a nice side-effect, more dates are showing up alongside the postings. Nice!

Apologies for hiccups in Traceless. Google just completed an algorithmic update and changes were made that put the Google section out of commission for a while. Things should be working again.

Last month, Democrats demanded this of Google. Now Google employees themselves don't want to be tracked when they search for abortion services.

They want Google to automatically delete any search history information related to “abortion-related locations.” They are also demanding that Google Maps delete all information about “fake” abortion centers, by which they mean crisis pregnancy centers. This raises an obvious question. How long do you need to work at a massively invasive company like Google before you suddenly become concerned over people’s data privacy?

You don’t need Google’s language translation function to decipher what that means. They aren’t concerned with any other sorts of healthcare issues or benefits. Only abortions and transgender surgery services, puberty blockers, etc.

If you want to search for a particular phrase, or want to search for a sequence of characters in a particular order, enclose the query in quotes, and Google will search accordingly. If I recall correctly, Google had this feature in the past, and then it was apparently discontinued. I found that enclosing a phrase in parentheses did the trick. But now quotation marks work again.

Google rewards a website for how long a user stays on it, with the reasoning being that at a bad website, the user immediately hits the back button.

Well, well. How magnanimous of them. Google says that it will pause on snooping on people when they visit an abortion clinic, so as not to give the police data to convict, on the chance that this could be illegal. Gee, Google, how about other things that people do illegally? Will you stop that, too? Should we genuflect to you for this generous gesture of wokeness? Say, how about not snooping on people at all? And how can people trust you?

A Google spokesperson did not immediately answer how the company would identify such visits or whether all related data would be wiped from its servers.

Apparently, people still search Google directly. And police were allowed by Google to search their query database and tie that information to a specific ID and location. People know this, of course, but Google still has the information. Sigh.

So Democrats think it's perfectly reasonable to have Google modify search results so that political party-preferred links get displayed first (maybe exclusively) and non-preferred links get displayed further down (or not at all). Very totalitarian, eh? And they see nothing wrong with doing this. Hope Google ignores this request, but maybe they've done something like this already? Which is why it was reasonable to attempt this request, because it wouldn't be the first time? (cough...2020...cough)

This is how Google makes money. When you type in your search terms and hit the Enter key, your request is processed to isolate the content, and sent to appropriate ad agencies that conduct an auctionfrom companies that bid to place their ad on your search results page. Plus, your ID is retained, so that companies can present their ad to you on other webpages that have code that inserts ads. It's all a big network, and the process happens in milliseconds. Now lots of companies potentially know that you were looking for ways to treat an embarrassing rash, or that you might have COVID, or something even more secret.

This is actually not news, as this technology has been used for several years. You can see articles on this as far back as 2017. The practice still goes on apparently. Do you think the major search engines would do this? If you aren't already, use a good ad blocker extension in your browser. And if a website demands that you take it down, run away. As you can see, if you look, Traceless doesn't log keystrokes.

I decided to sit on this for a few days after I first read about it. Trackers from Microsoft and LinkedIn are permitted to remain active in DuckDuckGo's browser, but not on the search engine site itself. At first, this seemed like something that would be contained, since I don't use the browser. But the attitude of Gabe Weinberg in just shrugging it off bothered me. It appears that the tracker permission issue wasn't something that most people were aware of, and Gabe thinks it's no big deal. What else do we not know about? Traceless no longer uses DDG search, but still uses them to access Google and Bing images, although on the mobile site, I decided to go with DDG-filtered Yahoo Images. So far, I see no reason to change anything, but it just feels that a company that privacy-minded people respected has let us down. Trust lost is difficult to regain.

ZeroHedge posts an update. Weinberg doesn't acquit himself well, especially not with the savvy YCombinator crowd.

One of the quirks with Google is that if you search too often within a certain period of time (the precise duration is known only to them), they will present you with a ReCAPTCHA to prove that you are human before giving you the search results. I am not able to bypass this, in order to scrape the results page. This is why the Google side is sometimes blank in the desktop version. However, in the mobile version, lack of Google results messes up the FOR loop that displays the results, and nothing is displayed. Very annoying. Hopefully, this has been fixed today, so that if problems occur with Google, at least the Brave results will still be displayed. Of course, this is not a problem on the desktop version, where at least you can get results on the Brave side of the page.

The image link on the mobile version of Traceless now has a link to images. I decided to go with Yahoo! Images, redirected from DuckDuckGo, so it's not a direct link. The reason is that the image results are cleaner than what appears on Bing, which is now cluttered with side links and clickbait suggestions. As with the desktop site, do not click on these, or start a new search from the URL bar. If you do this, you will lose your anonymity. Always close the window when you are done looking at the images. This facility was added just for convenience.

The mobile version of the search site is now online. You'll be redirected to it automatically if you're accessing via a phone. The entries alternate between Google results and Brave results. There is always more Google results than Brave results, so eventually the alternate striping disappears. Added a Clear button as well, as I kept wishing for it and finally got around to it.

The infrastructure is the same as it was on PrivateDuck. Made a few refinements on the Brave side. I just wanted to free the name from what it was in the past and emphasize that this is just a service that provides simple, traceless links based on search results.

This has been declared legal in the past, but it's nice to see it reaffirmed. So one can scrape search results from search engines, remove the tracking and ID parameters that can be used for data mining.

Google Lite: DuckDuckGo Announces Purge of Independent Media – “Only MSM Allowed”

Gabe Weinberg announced yesterday that he is trashing his brand for real, and will only allow links from mainstream media. This is because of the Russia-Ukraine war. This means we'll get all the "atrocity" links and images that CNN can provide. Because we know where CNN gets their news. So instead of independent sources, where the truth often can be found, we get canned information for our general consumption. Since they got rid of Yandex, their main source of search results was from Bing (yuck). So from today, I swapped out DuckDuckGo and put the Brave search engine in its place.

DuckDuckGo 'down-ranks' Russian disinformation. The search engine's users are not happy.

Gabe Weinberg is doubling down on his decision to remove "disinformation" from DDG's search results. This probably results from the fact that DDG gets some of its search results from Yandex, and of course, Russian-leaning links come up, and he doesn't like that. It's interesting that some Redditors think that search engines should filter results and remove harmful information, while others recognize that who is the arbiter to decide what harmful is. It's clear that mainstream media sources filter out anything that makes Democrats look bad, so one really should steer clear of anything that smacks of information curation. I'm still considering alternatives.

Gabriel Weinberg couldn't just let DDG be a neutral search engine. He recently announced that he finally succumbed to the temptation of being yet another information arbiter, and will have DDG start filtering search results to remove "disinformation" so that the public would only see "quality" links, because, you know, we wouldn't be able to judge for ourselves. Needless to say, this change in philosophy was not appreciated. I will be looking at switching the right side of PrivateDuck to a different search engine, and may change the name of this site as well. Stay tuned.

DuckDuckGo has reconfigured their coding recently, and so the DDG side of PrivateDuck was empty for a few days. Should be working now.

• Website operator fined for using Google Fonts “the cloudy way”
  

• DDG grew by 47% in 2021
  

But I just use PrivateDuck anyway, so it doesn't matter.

• Switching back
  

• Switching to SearX
  

SearX is a little slower, as it is a metasearch engine, and so one must be patient. I scrape the listings off SearX before posting the listing. I scraped off the Morty service from SearX since it mainly functioned to sanitize links from trackers, which is what PrivateDuck does.

I'll see how this new search engine substitute goes. If it doesn't pan out, I will find something else.

• https://jonatron.github.io/webgl-fingerprinting/
  

• https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-02-26/google-judge-disturbed-that-even-incognito-users-are-tracked
  

• https://gizmodo.com/your-credit-score-should-be-based-on-your-web-history-1845912592
  

• https://blog.privacytools.io/delisting-startpage/
  

  Update: they're back on privacytools.io, after some clarification.

• https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/01/government-tracking-google-searches
  
• An update: https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/08/government-knocking-doors-because-google-searches/312599/
  
• https://www.networkworld.com/article/3182693/possibly-the-worst-mass-invasion-of-internet-privacy-ever.html