

Haystack: A small utility helping to protect your searches - norova
https://github.com/norova/haystack

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bobds
I prefer GoogleSharing.

<http://www.googlesharing.net/>

"With Google's introduction of SSL support for search requests
(encrypted.google.com):

The result is that Google knows what is being searched for, but doesn't know
where the requests are coming from. The GoogleSharing proxy can tell where
requests are coming from, but can't tell what the content of the requests is.
And the user can avail themselves of Google services without having to trust
either Google or GoogleSharing."

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naner
Not to knock your efforts, but this looks like a naive and wasteful approach
to privacy. It seems like it would be pretty easy to separate the needle from
the haystack when dealing fake searches (are any links clicked from fake
searches? are cookies used? javascript? useragents? what about google's
realtime search? are you searching for nonsense terms?).

Also I'm not confident this thing isn't going to randomly pick embarrassing
search terms.

~~~
norova
This is why I shared it. In the unlikely event that someone find it the least
bit useful, they might want to expand on what already exists (which admittedly
isn't much) and improve it. All of your points make complete sense, and as
I've said in the github notes, the project was just something I cooked up
quickly a few years ago. Small ideas can grow into big things; figured it was
worth the bandwidth to publish.

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cjbprime
(You should be aware that Haystack's also the name of a failed and
cringeworthy attempt at creating privacy software.)

I think it's pretty irresponsible to publish privacy tools that you know don't
actually give adequate privacy. It's easy for _me_ to see the holes in this
technique, but not everyone is technical. If someone's reading this and
considering deploying this tool, please just use tor + torbutton instead..

~~~
norova
God forbid I put myself out there in an attempt to share something with the
world (which is _admittedly_ naive) and maybe let someone else improve upon an
idea. I'm so terribly irresponsible.

~~~
mthoms
You did nothing wrong and should carry on learning, coding and sharing. Thanks
for sharing your project with HN.

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tmcw
Haystack? You mean the MIT project?
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haystack_(MIT_project)>, the search tool
<http://haystacksearch.org/>, the horribly-implemented privacy tool
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haystack_(software)> or...

~~~
ac52
... the Facebook object store?
<http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=76191543919> or ...

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mx12
Why not just use scroogle (<http://scroogle.org/>)?

Even if it randomly searches for stuff, the searches are still linked to you,
and I would be concerned over what terms it was searching for if my search
history were ever subpoenaed. I could images several cases where this could
get you into trouble.

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greenyoda
Why not just use DuckDuckGo.com as your search engine? They don't save any of
your personal information, and they return less content-farm spam than Google
does. (My second choice would be scroogle.org, which somebody else already
mentioned -- an anonymous Google proxy, and doesn't require a browser add-on
like googlesharing.net does.)

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norova
Just a little note. I just pushed this to Github recently after discovering
the code on my machine. I wrote this little utility a few years ago and didn't
do much with it. Thought I would share the code and see if anyone else finds
it useful! Thanks for taking a look.

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gnosis
Would be nice to have a Linux utility like this that was browser-agnosic and
os-agnostic (ie. configurable to mask as any browser/os).

Another useful feature would be to have the utility follow some of the "next
page" links on some of the searches, to make them look even more like regular
human searches.

~~~
norova
The "next page"-type behavior and more human-like searches was something I
originally intended on adding but never got 'round to it. After re-discovering
the code on my machine though, I'm finding myself a bit re-motivated.

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bpodgursky
Excellent, God forbid Google ever use your search queries to improve its
ranking algorithms and give more relevant results.

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