Prevent Boss From Snooping On Your Google Search Queries
There are chances that someone is secretly spying on your Google search tracks for various reasons. For example, the employer may monitor your Google search habits to know if you are looking for jobs elsewhere while the local ISP may be collecting your Google queries with the purpose of selling that data to large analytics companies.
You cannot prevent these people from watching you because Google appends the search queries to the URL without encryption. So when you type "Jobs New York" in the Google search box, it returns a search page with the URL google.com/search?q=jobs+new+york and that makes data collection fairly simple.
There’s however a workaround - just use Google with a mask that comes indirectly from Google itself.
The following 10 websites are all hosted on the same server as Google.com and they are exact replicas of the main Google website - you cannot find a single difference unless you look at your browser address bar.
And the URL names of these websites ("ABN Amro Bank Group", "I Love Your Robin", "United American Fund", etc) sound fairly ambiguous so your boss (or local ISP) will never feel that they you are doing a search on Google.com.
1. www.americanlandmarkfence.com
2. www.unitedamericanfund.com
3. www.earningspace.com
4. www.jeanoffer.com
5. www.factualearn.com
6. www.abnamrobankgroup.net
7. www.glisteningwhitesmile.com
8. www.iloveyourobin.com
9. www.nuzrinmira.com
10. msm.byu.edu
They also let you search all Google sites like Google Images, Finances, News, Google Groups, etc.
Make any one of these sites as the default search provider in your web browser and toolbars and your Google searches will be secure again from voyeurs.
Related: Google also records your search queries for genuine reasons but if you are not convinced, here’s how to prevent Google from recording search habits.
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The boss and the ISP will also read this article. Then what ?
WARNING: These domains are not “hosted by Google” as such, they have merely been setup by their owners to point to Google’s servers. (Since Google allows itself to be served regardless of host name, what you actually see is the Google homepage.)
If you make one of these your homepage, you could theoretically get into work one morning and open your browser to find your screen covered with porn — which would inevitably get you into more trouble than if you were just searching Google for jobs!
that seems to be good idea but if a person wants to target specific region google search e.g google.co.uk ..will that work in this option.
WOW !!
How on earth did you find these sites?…Awesome
Curious to know about similar adresses for Orkut and other networking sites….
What domain name did you tried? I tried it but I get other domain names: http://gagspace.com/ip2vhost/?ip=google.com
Thank you for this excellent tip !
All these sites redirect to Google.com… Is this legal ? I doubt…
This is very useful. How do you find it?
fya, Iloveyourobin.com reports a 404 error message.
Try this url : http://iloveyourobin.com/imghp?oe=UTF-8&hl=us
I would recomend https://ssl.scroogle.org
Searchqueries are encrypted by SSL and Scroogle uses HTTP POST in stead of HTTP GET, so your query will not be appended to the URL.
I think this is the only way that truely works.
Search is still in the URL
http://msm.byu.edu/search?hl=en&q=test&btnG=Google+Search
Hi Atlwolf, hope this helps to clear your doubt.
In offices there are tools at proxy server side which checks the queries appended to http://www.google.com url, In this case those tools may ignore the queries which comes to http://msm.byu.edu
Thanks,
Dutt
using anonyomous service such as googlanonymous can solve this too.
Are these sites work-safe?
Hi,can any body plz send me alternate url to radiusim.com or tell me how can i open blocked web in my office.
Quite funny.
For how long do you think the big corporations would be unaware of such tactics. Wouldn’t they add these sites too to the ‘grab-list’. How tough is this config??
If one doesn’t want others to tap his surf habits, better to do the surfing at public-browsing-centers!