Don’t leave traces
August 21st, 2006
Many of you probably know about the leaked aol searches that happened a while ago. Besides being completely hilarious they also made people aware of the fact that search engines store all your search results, being logged in to the services makes it all the easier for them too.
So to alleviate that at least a little bit, I have written a little Greasemonkey extention that routes the searches you would normally make on Google, Yahoo!, or MSN through a secure search proxy over at http://www.blackboxsearch.com.
Just install Greasemonkey, install the script from here (http://www.nemik.net/blackboxsearch.user.js) and visit your Google, personalized googe.com/ig, Yahoo, or MSN page as normally. But whenever you do a search it will go through the anonymous proxy so that Google and others cannot keep track of your searches. 
Let me know what you think of it. Also be sure to check out a much cooler aim at screwing up Google’s and other search engines’ datamining methods: http://www.lostinthecrowd.org.
August 21st, 2006 at 11:38 pm
Nice! Is it possible to make it work with the search bar? Thank you.
August 22nd, 2006 at 10:06 am
That is a great idea. I’ll try to create some tonight for the same big 3 search engines.
Thanks!
If I don’t get to it, I heard the search engine plugins are easy to work with and create. Blackboxsearch’s search URL is blackboxsearch.com/cgi-bin/search.cgi and it needs a hidden field of name=’engine’ value=’google’ (or yahoo or msn) to know which one to look at.
Also, the input field for the actual search has name=’q’.
August 22nd, 2006 at 10:26 am
[...] + Learn More About This Greasemonkey Script! Tags: security, scripts, Yahoo, MSN, Google, history, searchAugust 22nd, 2006 at 10:26 am [...]
August 22nd, 2006 at 10:54 am
Beautiful idea — I got bored and refactored the code a little. Modified version is here:
http://henrah.googlepages.com/blackboxsearch.user.js
August 22nd, 2006 at 11:05 am
If you want to replace the Google quicksearch in Firefox, you can replace the URL with:
http://blackboxsearch.com/cgi-bin/search.cgi?engine=google&q=%s
And it will do the same thing. Not sure about changing the URL in the search bar as I only use the quicksearch functionality.
August 22nd, 2006 at 11:44 am
Any way to get this to work with the Google toolbar? Right now it looks like only in-page searches get routed. Well if not I’ll just do all my animal bondage pr0n searches from the Google page proper.
Thanks for the script!
August 22nd, 2006 at 12:56 pm
Thanks, looks great.
August 22nd, 2006 at 1:29 pm
It’s actually even easier than that:
In your Firefox preferences, go to “Privacy” >> “Cookies” and set “Keep Cookies:” to “until I close Firefox”.
If you don’t have a static IP or use your ISP’s search engine (like AOL), or leave your browser open for months, you’re save
August 22nd, 2006 at 7:35 pm
[...] Don’t leave traces– Nemik’s Blog (tags: extension extensions Google internet search SearchEngine security tool web plugins) [...]
August 23rd, 2006 at 12:36 am
The extension fouls up Web maps in Google, the kind where you enter an address in the Google searchbar and you get a choice of maps. It gives an Object Not Found error.
August 23rd, 2006 at 1:17 am
[...] Don’t leave traces– Nemik’s Blog (tags: search privacy Firefox greasemonkey) [...]
August 23rd, 2006 at 5:26 pm
An abomination.
August 23rd, 2006 at 8:56 pm
[...] Link [...]
August 24th, 2006 at 3:57 pm
[...] Don’t leave traces– Nemik’s Blog A greasemonkey script to avoid Google Yahoo or MSN data mining on your search. (tags: Search Proxy Google) [...]
August 24th, 2006 at 4:43 pm
just noticed you just got blogged over here:
http://www.googletutor.com/2006/08/24/6-ways-to-keep-your-search-secrets-safe/
nice ext!
August 24th, 2006 at 5:45 pm
Way to rip off busy city from opendesign.org. I believe you owe some credit to growldesign for your site.
August 24th, 2006 at 6:19 pm
Is one of your strategies to not leaving traces to use really light gray text on a white background?
August 26th, 2006 at 2:19 am
[...] TrackMeNot TrackMeNot is a lightweight browser extension that protects web-searchers against surveillance and data-profiling. [...]
August 26th, 2006 at 3:52 am
[...] TrackMeNot TrackMeNot is a lightweight browser extension that protects web-searchers against surveillance and data-profiling. [...]
August 28th, 2006 at 12:38 pm
[...] BlackBox Greasemonkey extension: an extensions that reroutes your searches at Google, Yahoo, or MSN through BlackBoxSearch, a secure proxy. [...]
August 28th, 2006 at 10:51 pm
Thanks for the script! You can find Firefox search engine plugins for BlackBox here:
http://mycroft.mozdev.org/download.html?name=blackbox
August 29th, 2006 at 9:13 am
Thanks for the script.
If you feel the need to actually change the Google search engine plugin instead of using the Blackbox plugin for google, just edit the google.src file in the action field. I also removed the update, so that it would not write over my changes.
October 8th, 2006 at 6:23 pm
[...] Don’t leave traces– Nemik’s Blog Many of you probably know about the leaked aol searches that happened a while ago. Besides being completely hilarious they also made people aware of the fact that search engines store all your search results, being logged in to the services makes it all t (tags: privacy search security greasemonkey proxy Firefox internet anonymous mozilla useful utilities aol news blog plugins web yahoo daily extension extensions google searchengine software hack tech technology hacks tool tools toread javascript) [...]
October 11th, 2006 at 6:42 am
The script has a few problems with google news or google codesearch. If you search on one of these, you automatically get transferred back to the web search. Perhaps you can fix this?
October 11th, 2006 at 10:34 am
Sec,
Yea I know, but blackboxsearch currently does not have a proxy for searching those parts of google, only the main one.
Though perhaps I’ll change the code when I have time to not use the proxy search when the user is on the news/images/codesearch, etc and get it to only be invoked for the regular search.
January 19th, 2007 at 10:28 am
use the customizegoogle extension to anonymize the google cookie UID and to block cookies getting sent to google analytics.
http://www.customizegoogle.com
and it doesn’t mess up the other google search applications.
May 5th, 2007 at 10:06 pm
[...] 5. Don’t Leave Traces FireFox/Greasemonkey Extention [...]
November 30th, 2007 at 2:54 pm
I tried using the blackbox website for search but could not get search results from google or yahoo. Using either one returned a 404 site not found. Is this something with my firefox config or is the tool only useful for common search results?