Blogspam, URL shorteners (such as tinyurl or bit.ly) are not allowed.Comments or posts that are disrespectful or encourage harassment of others (including witch-hunts of any kind) are not allowed. So this is what it feels like when a search engine actually wants to send you to another site.Įventually, Ghostery plans to integrate its ad-tracking tech even further, perhaps allowing you to filter out sites that have more than 20 trackers from results, or ranking pages based on privacy-friendly metrics. Eventually I missed being able to drill down to news results specifically, or being able to search for images at all-again, that’ll be there in the final build-but honestly there was something refreshing about searching for something on the internet and finding link after link after link about what you are looking for, instead of ads and knowledge panels and AMP carousels. If anything, by stripping away all of the frippery and bloat that makes Bing a slog, Ghostery offers a stirring defense of that engine's core capabilities. Presumably whatever bug kept me stuck on page one will be squashed by then as well.Īs for the results themselves, they were fine! A couple of years ago I used Bing extensively and exclusively, and found that while it had plenty of annoying ticks it actually served up decent results. Tillman says that by the time the beta launches, Ghostery’s search product will include image and video categories, and will soon after add staples like shopping. The iteration I used didn’t have basic features like image, map, news, and video returns, and I ran into an error message whenever I tried to navigate to the second page of results. My experience with search is a little harder to go on. ![]() Basically, it makes it as hard as possible for ad companies to follow you around the web. It also enables advanced features like dynamic first-party isolation and protection against tracker-cloaking technology by default. ![]() In addition to the stock privacy and anti-tracking features you can already find in the Ghostery extension, it takes advantage of Firefox features like Redirect Tracking Protection, which wipes away cookies and site data every 24 hours from sites you don't visit often. Over the course of a few days of playing with the pre-beta as my daily driver, I found the Ghostery browser itself to be stable, with all the features you’d expect given its Firefox foundation. “It’s much more aggressive,” says Tillman, “to the point where things get a little unusable.”) (It also comes with a private browsing mode that goes to 11. And privacy-friendly settings that might be optional on Mozilla’s browser are turned all the way up by default in Ghostery. “We take Firefox and then we strip it down.” That means no integrations like Pocket, which comes standard on Firefox proper. “We think that the core of the browser is really good,” says Tillman. That’s partly because of the foundation that Firefox and Bing provide. Likewise, Tillman says the next phase of growth will include promoting Ghostery search as an option in more established browsers.Īctually using the Ghostery browser and search engine in tandem, even at this early stage, is a refreshingly zippy if minimalist experience. ![]() The Ghostery browser doesn’t lock you into the company’s search engine you can choose from six options to use as your default-yes, including Google. While they’re launching at the same time, Ghostery browser and search aren’t inextricable. We thought that we could do a lot more if we played by our own rules.” “But at the end of the day you’re playing by somebody else’s rules. ![]() “We’ve been building the extensions for a long time,” says Ghostery president Jeremy Tillman. Earlier this year, the company saw an opportunity to expand on its core mission of making digital privacy available to the masses. Over 7 million people use Ghostery products a single-digit percentage of them have paid for one of the company’s subscription services. It also maintains a mobile browser for Android and iOS, the former of which has been installed over a million times. If you’re familiar with Ghostery already, it’s likely through its incarnation as a popular open-source browser extension that blocks trackers and ads. Which is why using Ghostery’s new ad-free search engine and desktop browser, even in their pre-beta form, feels at once like a throwback to a simpler internet and a glimpse of a future where browsing that puts results ahead of revenue is once again possible. Year after year, ads have gobbled up more space on its results pages, pushing organic results further out of view. As that business has grown, it’s reshaped what search looks like. Google brought in $26 billion of search revenue in the most recent quarter alone. The internet runs on advertising, and that includes search engines.
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