1y ago

Ghostery Private Search

www.ghostery.com Free Private Search Engine Extension for Chrome and Firefox

Say goodbye to ads and trackers with our free private search engine extension. Available for Chrome and Firefox, install now for a safer browsing experience.

A privacy focused search engine without logs or trackers, own index and above all, the special feature to show in the search result the ads, trackers and other crap waiting for us in every listed page.

Clicking in the icon marked with the arrow for an complete analytic in whotracks.me

To insert the search engine in the browser

https://ghosterysearch.com/search?q=%s

21 comments

- Yes they were, and they used what you personally blocked to better enable ads that would bypass their adblocker. They had some catchy name for it, I don't remember what. When they were exposed for their practices the privacy community did a mass uninstall. These features actually seem good, but I will never trust them again.
  I tried to follow the link just to look at it, my firewall blocks it for 'tracking', I could bypass it but once bitten, twice shy.
- My thoughts exactly... Hard pass
- Ghostery was also intimately involved with what is now Brave Search, IIRC.
- Yes. If you use Ghostery and are looking for an alternative I highly recommend Privacy Badger. It's created by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and is free and open source. Great piece of software.
- Yes, but the same as with Startpage. Despite the company, it's privacy features are already valid (GDPR), better as DuckDuckGo, Qwant, and other privacy search engines, the only seach engines without any tracker and/or ads are Andisearch. MetaGer, Mojeek, GetPage, Groot Search and few more, but it's depend of which data is collected to put in risk the privacy, tecnical data are not the same as personal data. Ads and trackers are anyway blocked with the adblockers everybody use, the risk is only the logging of the user activity and this none of the privcy search engines do.

If it has anything to do with the ghostery addon that was bought by ad company, keep away from it
- I don't use ad ons from Ghostery, nor the browser, the search engine is in my list good for analyze certain pages, as daily search I use Andisearch, Mojeek, Getpage and Groot, sometimes also LibreY, all these 100% "clean". Addons I use are CanvasBlocker, SiteBleacher and a userscript to show the middlefinger to YT anti adblock. Ad and trackerblocker the inbuild.

Trust them and they will F. You,
- I don't trust not even my shadow in the web, but one thing is an online service, like a search engine, and another an installed app.
  
  A search engine is a perfect tool to track though.
  You click or not etc. And data are correlated etc.

Another independent search company with its own index is great. Repackaging Bing and Google isn’t good enough. I’d be cautious with their privacy claims though.
- looking at it it would seem to be getting results via the brave search api
- With own Index Andisearch (using AI) and SSuite Groot Search, you can also use a meta search like E-Tools, it use several search engines which you can select.

Is this service paid? If not, how are they making any money? All I can think of is a) selling users data (and lying) b) selling spots in search results, which means they'll be overrun with malicious links or other useless garbage. I don't believe they're just hosting a search engine out of the kindness of their hearts (:

Does it detect the paywalls and cookie walls too?
- I don't use pages with paywalls which I can`t skip (very few), cookie walls don't exist for me, they are skipped all.

Ghostery seems to be a GmbH(1) which is a German for-profit company. Does anyone know how they're making money?
(1) https://www.ghostery.com/privacy/imprint
- As a European company, it is obliged to comply with existing privacy laws (GDPR) in order to operate. The necessary income is obtained through the Ghostery Enterprise. Similar to what Proton does, although Proton is OpenSource, they require revenue for the servers for the mail service and the VPN, but they offer these for free without ads or tracking in a reduced form, in mail with the storage limit and the VPN with a reduced number of servers (21 in 3 countries), financed with premium accounts.
  There are many methods of creating income on the Internet and they are normally US companies that use the method of surveillance advertising, trafficking in user data, these practices are not used in the EU due to existing privacy regulations and even large corporations have to take care of them. An example is comparing Microsoft's privacy in the US and the EU (where it is not perfect either but light years better)
  Microsoft US (Blacklight)
  
  Microsoft EU
  
  Ghostery Private Search analytics Blacklight
  Webbkoll analytics (No third party requests out of Ghostery)
  https://webbkoll.dataskydd.net/en/results?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ghostery.com%2Fprivate-search
  I check the sites, services and apps with several Tools before I use them
  
  Ok, premium features, In think that's a good business model for FOSS and closed source companies.

Hmm.
We'll see.

21 comments