DuckDuckGo: Uh-oh! Search add-on goes nuts…

Lots of people are using the search engine DuckDuckGo these days.

It’s a bit more “friendly” than behemoth Google, and it still gives great search results.

In fact, you may have read my earlier article Search like a pro with DuckDuckGo: Better privacy + great search results.

In that post, I recommended against using the DuckDuckGo add-on.

Well, now there’s an even bigger reason not to use it!

(more…)

Erase your Google Search History and make Google more Privacy-Friendly

Privacy? What privacy?Everybody uses Google these days for all kinds of things. If it isn’t search, it’s Google Maps, plotting the fastest route to your vacation destination, checking the weather, or letting your Android phone track your every movement to make Google Now services “useful”.

It’s pretty much a certainty that Google is tracking your every move. This is the price you pay for all these wonderful whiz-bang features that you have come to rely upon.

If you do value your privacy, there are a few tricks you can use. But, a word of warning: it’s probably much worse than you think.

(more…)

How to “Search in Message” in Thunderbird 3.1

With the advent of Thunderbird 3, searching messages became a bit more sassy in the old bird.

There is one little problem: it is not readily apparent how one actually searches for text inside an open e-mail.

It used to be that you could just type Ctrl-F and the little “Find” bar opened at the bottom of your message pane/window. Type in some text, and all instances of that text would be highlighted in the open message.

In the latest Tbird, that doesn’t work in certain cases. In fact, searching in an open message has become downright annoying, and nobody seems to know how to make it work. Several people even filed bug reports about it.

This situation was obviously intolerable, so I finally managed to solve it!

(more…)