‘Seeks’ the Open Source Alternative to Scroogle: Should Google Be Worried?

In response to my post Great Privacy Search Alternatives to Scroogle one of my readers sent me the following comment:

‘Encrypted searches on Google will prevent people on your local network and/or your ISP/government from snooping on you, but will leave you wide open to Google's profiling. Scroogle prevented that.’ (As you may know by now, it is dead.)

As much as one may want to think of Google as a benevolent giant, its actions are looking increasingly suspect. From collecting data from via Google Street View cars to circumventing Safari's cookie policy, it is difficult to imagine Google would give up on tracking us especially because their business model depends on targeted advertising.

Google has many ways of profiling us from signing in to an account the most obvious, to cookies, to Google analytics because for them our collective profiles are worth too much. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has warned that despite allowing us to disable our searches, Google may still be tracking us.

So what is the alternative?

If one wants privacy from a large centralised company, either they should use services from a smaller centralised company (lesser evil), or use a decentralised service.

Seeks is an open, P2P, decentralized platform for collaborative search, filtering and content curation. It believes that freedom in online search lies in the social treatment of information, not in the automated treatment of data. It does not matter who crawls the content, or who serves the results. What matters according to Seeks is:

·        Privacy: be served anonymously;

·        Freedom to control the results: edit, reject, share, rank;

·        Freedom to trust who you search with, who influences your results, ….

Seeks tries to achieve this objective through a mix of machine learning and active user feedback.

To maintain privacy, Seeks allows to proxy you through to the search engine, so it does not see your IP address or browser header.

Seeks will also let you build rings of collaborative searchers, share, recommend stuff, modify results, and more.

Seeks implements a meta-search engine. Besides using its own database, Seeks can query a number of sources like:

• search engines, such as Google, Bing, Blekko, Yahoo, Yauba, Exalead,
• specialized websites such as Youtube, Dailymotion,  Google images, Bing Images, Yahoo Images, Flickr,
• microblogging platforms, such as Twitter and Identica
• generic frameworks, such as Mediawiki, Dokuwiki, WordPress, Redmine,
• standardized formats, such as OpenSearch, RSS, ATOM

Check it out: https://www.seeks-project.info/search.php/websearch-hp

Or use one of the public node (in https obviously) listed on:
http://seeks-project.info/wiki/index.php/List_of_Web_Seeks_nodes

There is also a firefox browser plugin available at:
https://gitorious.org/seeks-firefox/seeks-firefox/

The intended way to use Seeks is to install it on your own computer. It
will proxy searches to other search engines (the way it does normally) and will
create a profile to sharpen results for you. As the profile is local, no
profiling is done by companies, and you keep control of your search profile.

First, install Seeks. If you’re running into difficulties, be sure to check the Documentation.

Seeks is a non-profit initiative but they already have a funding mechanism in place to keep themselves going in the form of Seeks pro an enterprise search tool. These guys seem to be here for the long run and will not be disappearing anytime soon which would be a prerequisite if one wants to take on the well-entrenched, deep-pocketed competition.

Seeks aims to return the power of search to the users that Google has monopolised and dictated through its ranking system.

The question is will the privacy features and the collaborative nature of Seeks attract more privacy search users or will the ease of use offered by Google win over despite its privacy concerns.

(This post was made possible with contributions from one of my readers who likes to  go by the pseudynym Thisisabore.)

Related articles

• How Much Does Google Know About You? Find Out Yourself! 

• Avoiding Email Spam: How much are we to blame?
• Great Privacy Search Alternatives to Scroogle