Asklemmy

43851 readers

1698 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
[email protected]: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

recommended search engine? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

24 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I've seen a lot of discourse over which browsers we use and I myself have made the switch from brave to firefox. I still use brave as my search engine though, so... which do yall recommend? Is brave's engine necessarily bad to use? I personally like its ui/theme.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

That's not how cookies work, cookies are stored on, and controlled by, your client. Unless your client is sharing the cookie information across devices, google wouldn't be able to track you across devices using cookies.

Sorry, I didn't mean to imply the same cookie is shared between clients. Google place cookies when you log in, and they know all the cookies associated with your account. You could always do searches when you're logged out, across all your devices, which would prevent them from tracking you cross-device. It's pretty rare for people to not be logged into a Google service though, especially on mobile.

Routing all of your searches to one machine allows google to build a richer search profile against you, rather than one scattered across multiple different IPs, device fingerprints, etc.

At the end of the day, your VPS is still having a search profile build against it, in a similar manner to just using your personal device.

You can get a bunch of people to use it though (friends and family). I also doubt they build profiles just based on IP, since it's not uncommon to share IPs given the IPv4 shortage. There's also CGNAT where hundreds of thousands of people share a sml number of public IPs.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 year ago

It’s pretty rare for people to not be logged into a Google service though, especially on mobile.

If that is the case then this conversation is somewhat moot isn't it? But I also don't really think it is all that rare for iOS users.

You can get a bunch of people to use it though (friends and family).

That's a good point, definitely see a benefit then.

I also doubt they build profiles just based on IP, since it’s not uncommon to share IPs given the IPv4 shortage. There’s also CGNAT where hundreds of thousands of people share a sml number of public IPs.

Certainly, and because of that you don't really need a proxy.

There are definitely some benefits to such a setup, I just don't think it really is superior to a search provider that is built around not logging and selling your searches. At least not to the degree it gets recommended in these types of posts.