Showing posts with label Custom Search. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Custom Search. Show all posts

Monday

Worried about Google tracking? Tips to protect your privacy

Posted By: Arin Dey - July 16, 2018
We all love Google, sure their results are awesome, however if you're concerned about privacy follow this post to know how you can modify the data of yourself that Google already has. Google is the number one search engine in the world now. Yes, it is and Google can snoop into your lives, build a huge profile over your connections and sell them. That's how it has amassed a fortune of making Google a top MNC in the world. Literally, Google is almost owning the internet. 

Worried about Google tracking? Tips to protect your privacy
They read/scan your emails, have built a profile based on you by tracking your web usage activities and advertising preferences of yours linked to a unique advertising id and sells them to the highest bidder at a great price. But unknowingly we take risk on losing our important data, ignoring how should we protect sensitive data from loss or theft.

How and where your data hides?
 Go to https://myaccount.google.com and you will find the shit you have done over the internet. You can delete them and disable all the things.

If you actively use Gmail, Google Drive, Google Assistant and what not? They are free because they aren't selling you the product. It's we the consumers who are the victims or so-called products.

In fact, they are making billions out of your crush's romantic messages, your cute kids pictures or even some of the weird and wild imaginary things your searched for on their website. Google maintains huge archives with a mammoth amount of data.

There have been several instances recently based on racial profiling and discriminatory hiring practices. For this, Google has been warned by several privacy and security agencies for alleged snooping into everything out their on the internet as if they own it! European Union has alleged Google a lot of times.

How to prevent security & privacy breach?

Even if you are a great Google lover, there are few steps that can be followed to be safe while using email/search/cloud services over internet by controlling or avoiding few Google products.

· Opt out of advertising based on your preferences.

· Stop using Gmail and switch to Protonmail/Tutanota.

· Avoid Google Drive and instead use Tresorit/SpiderOak. Else use BoxCryptor or other services to pre encrypt your files before uploading to Google Drive etc.

· If you're concerned about privacy switch to DuckDuckGo/StartPage/Qwant immediately.

· In case, you want an alternate safe search engine then switch to Privado (It doesn't store search history or IPs).

· Undoubtedly chrome is a great browser. Install extensions like Ublock origin, HTTPS Everywhere, Privacy Badger and Disconnect. If not switch to Firefox!

· If you're using an android device do this as soon as possible: Navigate to Settings >Google>Ads and opt out of personalization and reset your advertising id every month.

· Try avoiding apps called Allo/Duo.

Along with the above steps, open the URL https://myaccount.google.com/activitycontrols and make sure you are signed in to your Google account. Then, make sure all the slider/toggles are to the left ("paused"). If a confirmation box pops up asking you to confirm that you want to pause an activity, confirm it by clicking "Pause". Toggle to pause for Location history, Voice & Audio Activity, YouTube Search & Watch History. Additionally, under "Web & App Activity", uncheck "Include Chrome browsing history and activity from websites and apps that use Google services."

There are aspects of Google, both good and bad, that this article hasn't covered because the company is simply too big, and too complicated to comprehend. I'm not anti Google, however being concerned about how our data is used, who uses it and what pros and cons it holds is a consumer right. I am writing this post and sharing my opinion on the basis I learnt and experienced while using several popular products of Google.

Just remember one thing, if you're not paying for the product, you are the product! There is no such thing as a free lunch. I’m not sure how many people are aware of this. But the next time while you’re browsing the internet for finding some information or enjoying a video on YouTube, always remember that Google is watching your every move; because that’s the price you pay for that free service.

I would love to hear from you more on this.

Sunday

Top Search Engines of 2017

Posted By: Arin Dey - October 08, 2017
A lot of people don't need hundreds of search engines, especially people who are less tech savvy. All of the internet users want a single search engine that delivers below features:
  • More relevant and accurate results
  • Uncluttered, easy to read interface and view
  • Helpful options to broaden or tighten a search
Top Search Engines of 2017
Let us see how these below search engines serve the best to the internet users who are searching for information over web.

1. Google Search:

Google is obviously the king of search engines, and is the single most used search engine in the world. Without any doubt, Google is fast, relevant, and the largest single catalogue of web pages available since few years now.

2. Google Scholar Search:

Google Scholar is a very special version of Google. This search engine is useful for the people who are preparing and taking part in debates. Google Scholar focuses on scientific and hard-research academic material that has been subjected to scrutiny by scientists and scholars.

3. Yahoo! Search:

Yahoo! is not only a search engine but it has some other features also like; news aggregator, a shopping center, an email service provider, a travel directory, a horoscope and games center, and several other features.

4. Bing Search:

Bing is Microsoft's product competing with Google, and considered as the second-most-popular search engine today. Bing used to be MSN search until it was updated in summer of 2009. Bing is growing and integrated a lot of search features.

5. DuckDuck Go Search:

Initially, DuckDuckGo.com used to look like Google. But there are a lot of things that make this  search engine different.

DuckDuckGo has some salient features, like 'zero-click' information. It means all of your searched answers are found on the first results page. DuckDuckgo offers disambiguation prompts that helps to clarify what question you are really asking. Additionally, the ad spam is much less than other search engines. It doesn't keep any private search results data into their servers as it is very much concerned about the privacy and security of internet users.

6. Dogpile Search:

Dogpile was better than Google in early 90's because it was considered as the fast and efficient choice for web searching. Later on, a lot of things got changed in the late 1990's, Dogpile faded into obscurity, and Google became king.

7. Yippy Search: 

Yippy is a Deep Web engine that searches other search engines for you. Unlike the regular Web, which is indexed by robot spider programs, Deep Web pages are usually harder to locate by conventional search.

8. The Internet Archive Search:

The Internet Archive is the best loved search engine for longtime Web users. The Archive has been taking snapshots of the entire World Wide Web for years now, allowing you and me to travel back in time to see what a web page looked like in 1999, or what the news was in earlier times, the stories maybe 2 decades ago.

9. Webopedia Search:

Webopedia is one of the most useful websites on the web. Mostly people from technology background love this search engines as it serves a lot of the search purposes of those techies. Webopedia is an encyclopedic resource dedicated to searching technology terminology and computer definitions.

10. Baidu Search:

Baidu, a Chinese search engine, offers a lot of services for websites, videos, multimedia files, news, translations and other useful functions, as well as global mapping service Baidu Maps. Baidu was established in 2000 by Robin Li and Eric Xu. Both of the co-founders are Chinese nationals who studied in Peking University and worked overseas before returning to China. In December 2016, Baidu ranked 4th overall in the Alexa Internet rankings.

11. Yandex Search:

Yandex is a Russian-established web index. This has turned into an exceptionally well-known internet searcher in Russia and also popular in few of parts of Europe as well. This search engine has 55-65% market share of total Search market in Russia.

12. Wolfram Alpha Search:

Wolfram Alpha is essentially a computational learning motor that figures any information. But it  desn’t mean that this web crawler is fundamentally for math nerds.You can even get some information about any reality, and this will give you the appropriate response.  It has got an incredible processing feature that makes this web index additionally pulls your answer quickly.

13. Ixquick Search:

Ixquick is one of the the best search engines if you are looking at the privacy of users. With Ixquick neither of the points of interest of your list items put away and no cookies are utilized. You can even set inclinations. However, you have to reset that following 90 days as they will be erased after that on the off chance that you are dormant for this internet searcher.

14. Ask.com Search:

Ask.com was initially called as Ask Jeeves. This web search engine is still especially the main decision for some clients in the USA. It represents 3% of the aggregate. The prevalent of indexed lists are as yet not that sufficiently much to fulfill the searchers' needs.

Conclusion

If you are looking at overall featured search engine, Google would be the best search engine, but when you’re looking for its alternatives with higher privacy and security, then I would prefer DuckDuckGo. I personally like DuckDuckGo over other search engines. I'd like to know your thoughts on the search engines, in case I have missed mentioning anything here. Also leave your comments below.

Wednesday

How To Customize Google Custom Search Engine And Search Button

Posted By: Poketors - September 28, 2011
If you are on web then needless to tell about the Google search and a lot of product related to the brand Google. In normal practice whatever we want to know, we simply open Google page and search it. So how about the search engine where you will specify teh parameters i.e. how and where to search? It sounds great. Okay, then we will tell you how to make a customize google search and also how to change the watermark of Google search bar and its button. Google provides a very user friendly platform where you can customize your google search with your required query and result.

How To Customize Google Custom Search Engine And Search Button

So now we will explain you how Google Custom Search Engine (CSE) works. Here we go:

Textbox Customization:

The Google CSE code looks like somewhat given in the below image. If you want to change the watermark image, copy the javascript source link i.e http://www.google.com/coop/cse/brand?form=cse-search-box&lang=en and open it in browser. Download the javascript. If you see the js, you will find some codes like following with a imagone link in it :
(function() { var f = document.getElementById(‘cse-search-box’); if (!f) { f = document.getElementById(’searchbox_demo’); } if (f && f.q) { var q = f.q; var n = navigator; var l = location; if (n.platform == ‘Win32′) { q.style.cssText = ‘border: 1px solid #7e9db9; padding: 2px;’; } var b = function() { if (q.value == ”) { q.style.background = ‘#FFFFFF url(http:\x2F\x2Fwww.google.com\x2Fcoop\x2Fintl\x2Fen\x2Fimages\x2Fgoogle_custom_search_watermark.gif) left no-repeat’; } }; var f = function() { q.style.background = ‘#ffffff’; }; q.onfocus = f; q.onblur = b; if (!/[&?]q=[^&]/.test(l.search)) { b(); } } })();

Below are the steps to change the watermark:

1. Copy the entire javascript code and paste it in Notepad.
2. Change the watermark.gif image link with your own desired image.
3. Save the file as google.js and upload it on web.
4. Again go to Google CSE code and replace the javascript code with your own edited code.


Submit button Customization :

It is very easy to customize as we do not have to edit any javascript here. We will do it via CSS.
Just open the Edit HTML and paste this code before

 <code>]]&gt;&lt;/b:skin&gt;<br /></code>


<code>

#SearchButton {<br />
 background:url(Your-Submit-Button-Image-Link-Here) no-repeat;<br />
 width:70px; }<br />
</code>

Please change the width according to the size of the button image and suitable to your site.
Done with teh size customiszation. Now go to Google CSE code and search for
<code> &lt;input type=”submit” name=”sa” value=”Search” /&gt;<br /></code>
Replace the above entry with the following :
<code>&lt;input type=”submit” name=”sa” value=” ” id=”SearchButton”&gt;<br /></code>
Here you are done with the button customization too. Hope the watermark and the button look like the same what you always wanted to appear on your page.

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