You’ve probably heard that search engines like Google, Yahoo and AOL (cfr. recent incident) keep track of your search history. Luckely we don’t live in China, but one can never say our Belgian (our even European) government will never claim the information for (il)legal purposes.

Although I’m a huge fan of Google products (Gmail, Gcal, Google Search), I’m trying to avoid this spying techniques as much as possible. Let me explain you some tricks.

The main problem is that I frequently use Gmail and Google Calendar, so I want to keep my cookie with login information to be kept by my browser. If I would disallow this cookie, there wouldn’t be a problem (not to mention the tracking of my IP-adress).

I found four solutions :

• Use multiple browsers, for example : Firefox for Gmail and Calendar (with cookie), IE / Safari for Google Search (witouth login-cookie and even more cookies of Google)
• Search Google with http://g.s.scandoo.com/. This mirrors the search results, so you don’t have to visit Google “physically”. It also informs you wether a site is suspicious or not.
• Use anonymous proxy-servers
• Use the brand new Firefox-extension TrackMeNot

Related articles :
http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2006/08/are-you-logged-in.html
http://www.google-watch.org/bigbro.html
http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2006/08/anonymous-google-cookie.html