Fake searches help throw snoopers off the scent
A new tool seeks to make your searches more private by hiding them in plain sight.
TrackMeNot periodically sends fake, innocuous queries to search engines, making it harder for someone to glean your actual search habits by reviewing the companies’ logs that contain your queries.
The tool, developed by two researchers at New York University, sends random searches, such as “boston clock” and “croissant,” to the four largest search engines — Google Inc., Yahoo Inc., Microsoft Corp.’s MSN and AOL. A fake search is made every 12 seconds under default configurations; the tool can generate millions of unique queries from its list, and users can add their own.
TrackMeNot, however, works only with the Firefox browser, which has less than 10 percent market share, according to WebSideStory.
TrackMeNot is available at: http://mrl.nyu.edu/~dhowe/ TrackMeNot
Search engine geared for school children
A new search engine promises to give schoolchildren results from sites prescreened by teachers and librarians.
Users of StudyBuddy can even choose a grade range, such as K-2, to narrow choices even more.
Time Warner Inc.’s AOL launched StudyBuddy in time for the school year. It is free, though a premium version with more resources is available for $4.95 a month.
June Herold, AOL’s vice president for education and consumer services, said StudyBuddy was a response to complaints that regular search engines aren’t as useful for homework.
Rare book collection headed for digitization
The Jamia Millia Islamia university in New Delhi plans to digitize its collection of books and manuscripts, some of them dating to the 16th century, to make them more accessible to researchers.
More than 1,600 rare books and 2,500 manuscripts, published from the 16th to 19th centuries, will be converted into digital form.
The yearlong project is scheduled to begin in September.
The books and manuscripts are in different languages, including Arabic, Persian, Urdu, Pashtu and Punjabi. The library also has numerous collections of original papers relating to India’s independence from British rule in 1947, including the private papers of many independence leaders.