Search Engines and Privacy II

To reiterate the opening line of the previous blog, “this is the part of the Internet experience where most users give away their privacy.  The Internet is free and that means you are the product.”
I taught my three-day course last week, OpSec in Cyberspace Domain/Electronic Signature Reduction, and one of the students asked me “what is the point in doing all this to guard our privacy if we are not doing anything wrong?” I think it is a great question and here is my humble reply.
Privacy is the precursor of security in all domains. In the physical domain, you close your curtains at night to gain privacy because it makes you feel more secure that nobody will be snooping on what you do at home, even when you are doing normal actives. In the cyberspace domain, privacy is also the precursor of security. If you keep your online activity private, it is more difficult to social engineering you and get hold of your credit cards, or other information that can be used to either rob you of your money or use your technology as a stepping stone to commit another crime.
When cybercrime costs our nation an average of $7.8 billion dollars a year (according to the Computer Crime Research Center http://www.crime-research.org/news/13.08.2006/2179/), then protecting your online privacy is a responsibility that all citizens should fulfil in order to curtail the cyber economic warfare being inflicted upon our nation.  

Although I spend 80 percent of the time using Ixquick, DuckDuckGo and Google, I explore the following search engines when the topic requires imagination. :-)
 
Dogpile.com
It offers web, image, video, news, blog, and job search. Before doing any search, click on the Preferences button found immediately below the Go Fetch button. Under the Preferences tab, go to Recent Searches and select Off. This search engine does not understand Boolean markings.
 
Gigablast
Once you read the description on their website, you will understand that you are the product here. Nevertheless, it is handy to use when one does not want to leave any rocks unturned. “Founded in 2000, Matt Wells created Gigablast to index hundreds of billions of pages with the least amount of hardware possible. Gigablast provides large-scale, high-performance, real-time information retrieval technology and services for partner sites. The company offers a variety of features including topic generation and the ability to index multiple document formats. This search delivery mechanism gives a partner "turnkey" search capability and the capacity to instantly offer search at maximum scalability with minimum cost. Clients range from NASDAQ 100 listed corporations to boutique companies. Gigablast is one of a handful of search engines in the United States that maintains its own searchable index of over a billion pages.” https://www.gigablast.com
Use the Advanced search rather than direct Boolean markers.

Addict-o-matic – addictomatic.com
It allows you to instantly create a custom page with the latest buzz on any topic. This is great to follow major events where one needs constant updates. Click on Available Sources after entering your topic, and this list pops down.

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​Kartoo.com
“Quick web search and get relevant results with the meta search engine with its directory and services that make the Net a portal KartOO totally free.” It offers free online chatrooms. Here again you are the product so proceed with critical thinking because EVERYTHING that you type here is parsed and indexed along with your IP address.

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Tag Galaxy at taggalaxy.de
Browse through Flickr photos in 3D with this flash application. It is a great search engine to find out relevance of the topic in question.
 
Icerocket.com
A great tool to look at all posts on blogs. It also allows you to search Twitter individually, and create an RSS feed to read post on your topic in a different platform as they are being posted on the web.
 
socialmention.com
This is a good one to look at hot topics.
 
Conclusion
If you are looking for obscurity and maximum privacy (about 90%), then you must also use a virtual private network service such as ExpressVPN.com
You might also wonder whether I am making you my product. The answer is no. I do not sell or trade your contact information. Notice that I am sending you directly to ExpressVPN.com rather than giving you the link that will give me a month free per each one of you that subscribes to the service.
The only thing I have asked in exchange for this free information is your liking my Art Meta Gallery Facebook page, and your following me in LinkedIn at the Meta Intelligence and Art Meta Gallery pages.
 
That is all for now. Thank you for reading!
 
Meta brings the courses Risk Management When Online and Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) Collection and Analysis to your organization regardless of where you are located. Watch this short clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aRXazQuPzFs Then call us to schedule training for your team or organization. ​