Ixquick It

Just a decade or so ago, metasearch engines compiled search results from dozens of viable web search engines. Today, there are really only a handful of commonly used search engines. The dominant engines practice data-mining to turn a profit.

That's not cool.

Yahoo is struggling. Bing is a joke... sorry Microsoft. Google, although it offers so many other free services, has become a scary behemoth. Google probably knows more about me than I do. I try to use it as little as possible. We need another option.

Enter Ixquick. Ixquick doesn't log data about its users, so there's nothing to sell. It also provides a proxy to visit the sites you've searched in private.

It's a fast way to search, too. One of the things I once liked about searching with Google was the ability to type a word and search by hitting enter. The new autocomplete messes up my timing with searches. Sometimes it puts letters in front of the ones I've already typed. Boo! That takes time to correct. Ixquick is a type-and-enter search, making it faster than Google, now.

Ixquick is becoming what the other search engines wanted to be when they first started. Google and Yahoo have been killed by the perception that changing things creates progress. What inspired people to use Google was the no-frills search with decent results. That's becoming a thing of the past.

I've been Ixquick searching for a few years, now. The engine has become faster and results are getting better. I foresee the day when it eclipses some of the other engines.

Will I still use Google for email, blogging and reading newsfeeds? For now, yes. But if a company like Ixquick pops up offering the save services at a nominal cost, I might have to make that leap.

If you still feel like you just MUST get the results you'd get from Google, Ixquick has a sister site called Startpage.com which returns Google search results through a privacy proxy.

Search Ixquick at www.ixquick.com or StartPage at www.startpage.com.

SpyCounterspy

It's been 10 years since the Valentine's Day 'outing' of US intelligence agencies by a guy named Lee Adams. A search for 'Lee Adams' today only pulls up the website of some musicians. I don't know what happened to this guy, or even if he really exsisted, but I remember his website from the late '90s. It was a seeming expose' of US government surveillance and espionage techniques. Some already knew these tactics, while, to others, it seemed pretty far-fetched. I was kind of in the middle.

For example, one-time pads, or OTP, are a fairly well-known method of passing private information. Anyone with knowledge of the numbers stations of the cold war recognizes the format. On the other hand, his descripton of techniques used by 'wheel artists' for vehicle surveillance was an eye-opener, and I wondered if our government would really waste that kind of manpower on the average dissenter.

Anyway, it was a cool website to me, back then, as I was younger and the cloak-and-dagger element appealed to me. I have no idea if any of those techniques are employed, anymore, nor do I really care. I don't have any reason to worry about that kind of stuff, right?

BLOCKED!

If you're reading this in China... well, you can't be reading this from China! China has BLOCKED www.tonewah.com!!! I found THIS SITE on the Presurfer. It allows you to test websites to see if they're blocked out by China's firewall. I'm honored to be blocked out. lol.

Wheel of Food

This is a pretty cool way to decide where to eat, for those of us who are fairly indecisive. I made one of these a few years ago using visual basic. It was just a randomizer that I had to fill in with local restaurants. This one searches yahoo to find your local eateries, and then creates a custom wheel for you. It not only does food, but just about anything that might be listed on Yahoo Local.