[tor-talk] Google as default search engine revisited

[Javier Bassi]

On Thu, Jan 12, 2012 at 4:47 PM, Eitan Adler <lists at eitanadler.com> wrote:
> While Google does have less than ideal privacy practices they are
> largely mitigated by the other anonymity preserving measures taken in
> TBB. In fact the entire point of TBB is to prevent remote sites like
> Google from being able to determine anything useful from the data
> being sent.
>
> There are two other reasons to prefer Google over other search engines:
>
> - Google is better in many (most?) cases such that the majority of
> people prefer using Google
> - Every patch against Firefox is another thing to maintain. While it
> may seem simple, this has non-trivial cost. Every time Firefox changes
> you have to check each and every patch you have and potentially update
> it.
>
> I'm not saying that Google should remain the default search engine but
> that to switch there should be a specific threat to mitigate and
> switching should be the best solution to that threat.

I agree with Eitan, google via Tor is not a threat to anonymity. Maybe
to privacy, as Kammerer said, Google knows which results you click but
doesn't know who clicked them. So privacy is decreased but anonymity
is not threatened.

But looking at this with a different angle. Google search performance
over Tor is horrible. Google instant (a so called "feature" that makes
a request with each letter you type  and starts giving you results
before you finished typing what you want to search) is quite annoying
without using Tor. With Tor, is unusable. Run HttpFox or something and
take a look at the number of requests when searching. That's why I
like Scroogle, one request, one reply.

Moving away from Google as default search engine will not only improve
TBB's user experience but also will reduce a the number of connections
out there, and that helps the network.