Avoiding tracking and anonymizing your Google searches are two different things : a record of some of the websites you have visited can be tracked without reaching them via a search engine (like google).
I've been using Googlesharing recently to get me out of the google filter bubble, it's a proxy but only for your Google searches ... http://www.googlesharing.net/
When you do a google search with the same search terms, with and without the Googlesharing proxy activated,
you can see the search results you're missing out on when google knows who you are.
Opting out of google search history of your personal search
I am not familiar with Google internals at all, but is that also true if you write just parts of an address when you browse, skipping the 'http://www.' part?nooby wrote:Google has a history of your searches.
Will that activate Google, and therefore store the address that you browse?
tallboy
Some browsers use Google's "safe browsing" by default* which will check the URL you've typed into the browser's address box is not a spoof malware site ...tallboy wrote:I am not familiar with Google internals at all, but is that also true if you write just parts of an address when you browse, skipping the 'http://www.' part?
Will that activate Google, and therefore store the address that you browse?
http://searchengineland.com/googles-safe-browsing-diagnostic-tool-14064
This offers some protection from phishing, but can result in Google being informed of the websites you visit, even though you are not using google search engine to get there, (and the website you are going to doesn't have any google trackers).
[ * can be switched off in Firefox browser ]
Nooby - I think that some of the symptoms you are discussing are related to "Google Suggest" or "Google Prompt" which is a feature that remembers other peoples most common/recent searches and displays those suggestions below your search box when you are typing in a word that you want to search.
It is a very annoying feature. I turn it off by making the following address my home page:
http://www.google.com/webhp?complete=0
(the last character is a "zero" not an "Oh"). This tells Google that you want a fresh search with no prompting.
It is a very annoying feature. I turn it off by making the following address my home page:
http://www.google.com/webhp?complete=0
(the last character is a "zero" not an "Oh"). This tells Google that you want a fresh search with no prompting.