recently ive been looking at ways of avoiding googlle tracking…
just a pet project to see if i could…
at first it all seemed fine, loading up dockers with alt search engines.
bit of a struggle to get it working with the vpn. but eventually… cool i can search and im getting way more results. just what i needed.
i closed the vm down turned off the vpn. all good. job done…
next day i switch it all on. do a couple of searches and get hit with a google capcha…
and this is where the issues started.
the browser was set up to ignore google. but not google capcha… so it would display the capcha screen but kill the icon and images. so there was no way to answer…
oh well try something else.
ok couple of seconds to reboot. and again all seemed good.
i did 2 searches and got hit with a capcha. i answered it.
it tried to reload the captcha and then i got, all searches have been limited as google thinks your a bot account…
hmmm… click back and i could still search. but if i clicked on the next page. imediate captcha. but again this one failed to load.
the reply button blocked.
next up just a couple of image searches… 120 results…
search something else 120 results.
again… 120 results.
then i remembered the hosts edit.
i # out the lines above and hey presto search returned to normal and no more captcha’s
image search is now showing 1000’s of results …
so yeah google looks to be playing dirty. if you block them 3 addresses google deliberately limits its services.
from what i can gather they aint content delivery ip’s either, but rather google telemetry ip’s
(feel free to correct that if its wrong)
so what do you think… google playing us… if we block there snooping they dont let us search?.
is that legal?.
It is their service, they don’t have to provide results.
If we block their tracking, they are welcome to decline searches for us.
I think I found that I had to enable gstatic to get captcha s to show up, which can be funny when visiting sites that simply don’t handle blocked elements and just break, awaiting a captcha reaponse.
Simply using noscript/unblock will show elements that are called in pages, and a pihole will show a lot of the external addresses contacted for assets (I.e. tracking pixels)
Best bet is Startpage, and aggregate the search with them if you want the Real Google results
I work with block on google & gstatic in the browser on an until-no-choice basis with umatrix. I find startpage.com gets me tech results well while being satisfyingly bad at shopping.
Am I recommending, no; do you also want to fight back dirty - the reader’s call.
while i would agree in essence
other companies that are doing telemetry, aint blocking searches.
microsoft for instance i have about 60 ip’s of there’s blocked and no noticeable effect on anything i do with my pc.
i use there msn and bing search.
no problem
yahoo i block everything from cookies to js and it still lets me search…
Google has made a total of 4 products over 35 years, the rest have been bought, or half baked and killed before they turned into anything genuinely useful.
Why are you using a service that a company half pays attention to anymore? Its all about money now, they could give a fuck less about your search.
When I can search “GTX 1060 Ebay” on both google and DDG and DDG is the one that actually gives me a result, I’m pretty sure thatys a sign that google is bleeding users on their engine.
Legit just use pi-hole with @PhaseLockedLoop 's setup and you’re good to go. He’s a 78 year old puritanical nutjob though so you’ll have to remove your porn sites.
Pi-Hole is the easiest with a front end GUI but you can create block lists with scripting that powerDNS and unbound can reference as well. Though that route is only recommended for command line junkies.
I do have some guides but I think I want to update them to be more sane. My block lists there are a bit large and not exactly sane. Ive got a new block list.
so what google is doing is they realize this silent cold war is going on. They are going to serve over URLs that break your ability to use their service kind of like with youtube ads. Its the realization of what I said would happen 4 years ago. You start an escalation war between yourself and big tech your going to have to spend more and more resources to keep fighting it. Its a protracted effort. If you have the resources by all means go for it but just know they have exponentially more than you and are fully within their right to do everything described in your post
@HEXiT If you want the updated config. DM me Ill get it to you early. It will take me time to update my posts. YMMV in that you may have to alter my blacklists and whitelists to handle your difference in how you use the web
DDG.GG is my preferred front end for Bing! mixed with Yandex. (honest, I use it all the time. it even has relevant results sometimes too, which is nice. It is not as good as Gargle was. )
