Search without Google Tracking You (My 'pseudo' Startup)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44802

by drm237 • 19 years ago

5 21 19 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

There's been a lot in the news lately about search engine privacy, so I thought for a quick project it might be interesting to make a site that doesn't allow the search engines to track you. It's still alpha quality, but please take a look and give me some feedback. Thanks. http://www.flyvault.com/safesearch

drm2379• 19 years ago

It may be worth noting that the iframe you see when you search is not google, but google's results served from our site. Of course, if we just showed google in an iframe, it wouldn't do anything for privacy.

amichail• 19 years ago

Why is this legal? I thought Google no longer has a search api.

drm2379• 19 years ago

The thing is, we're not making money from it in any way (which is why I call it a pseudo' startup), and because of that fair use can apply. Also, think about google. They scrape the entire web and profit by serving that as content...

davidw• 19 years ago

Isn't that against their terms of service or something?

How's this different/better from some kind of anonymizing proxy like tor?

drm2379• 19 years ago

With things like tor, it can be a little slower, especially if you just want to do a single search. With this, we've added in the feature so you can add it to your Firefox/IE7 search box and then easily use it right from the browser. So it's the same idea, we're just focusing on this one feature for the good of the community.

The other feature we have is endless scrolling, so if you search and can't find it in the first few results, you can just keep scrolling and we'll continue to populate it. That's something not many others have.

nickb• 19 years ago

Awesome! It's better, faster, nicer looking than Scroogle.org

bls2• 19 years ago

Instead of giving our private information to Google to use for 18 months, we are giving it to you to use indefinitely?

Where is your privacy policy?

And, what is your hosting provider's policy? I found out recently that my hosting provider refused to make any guarantees; that means that I cannot make any guarantees either, since my hosting provider has full access to my server.

drm2379• 19 years ago

A privacy policy is very high on my list of things to do, along with an explanation of how it works so that people can feel confident in their privacy. Right now, the only thing I record is a SHA1 has of everyone's IP address and a timestamp so that I can track how many unique people have used it. With the SHA1 hash, there's no (very difficult) way to trace that back to the user. I'm also talking to my host about the web server logs and how quickly those can be purged.

fadmmatt• 19 years ago

I hope that's SHA1 plus a secret salt.

Otherwise, I can just build a reverse map of SHA1'd ips.

for ip = 0 to 2^32: unhash[SHA1(ip)] = ip.

jsjenkins1682• 19 years ago

Can you use a SHA-2 hash instead? Those variants are considerably more difficult to break.

A problem I see with your service compared to an anonymizing proxy like Tor is that you are still a single point of failure(please correct me if I'm wrong though). If you were legally forced to turn over search records (as the govt was attempting with google a while back), then the requests could be traced directly back to the user.

You mention clearing the database daily which is a good idea. But again if it was compromised and a snap shot could be taken, then a brute force crack of your SHA-1 hashes would be possible. Basically, everyone is trusting the security of your database. A misdirection service which telescopes the request through interconnected proxies will not have this single point of failure issue.

Not criticizing your implementation, just making some observations. I think this is a great idea. Mainly your site is so easy for people to use, not needing to install a client application.

bls2• 19 years ago

The thing about low-cost web hosting is that it is impossible to stop your web host--or their contractors--from getting the data. Even if you use TLS (SSL), the web host and their associates have full access to your private key. For most hosting solutions, the best that you can do is colocating your own physically-locked server, and use TLS to encrypt everything.

Without using TLS, you cannot prevent the user's ISP from recording--and even reselling--your user's search histories. Similarly, your hosting providers could be doing the same thing. Keep in mind that hosting and bandwidth is a multi-level value chain--your host is probably renting space and bandwidth from somebody else, who is renting from somebody else, who is renting from somebody else. Any one of those companies and/or their rogue employees can collect, re-transmit, prevent, and/or redirect (e.g. man-in-the-middle) your user's queries without your knowledge.

tomek• 19 years ago

It's a nice initiative. You have probably heard of Scroogle (http://www.scroogle.org/cgi-bin/scraper.htl). How different is your thing from their thing?

drm2379• 19 years ago

They're very similar. The difference is that I like our interface better and we provide unlimited scrolling of the results. If people like the site and want to use it, I'm also planning on adding other search engines.

For the most part, it's been an experiment on my part to have a public site that people use. I've built quite a few sites, but this is the first with AJAX and some other technologies, so it's been a learning project for me as well.

Search without Google Tracking You (My 'pseudo' Startup)

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