Squiggle SR / News: Recent posts

SquiggleSR is a Firefox add-on which generates personalized queries to search engines to deceive search engines and protect user’s privacy. Queries are generated using personalized keywords and clicks are randomly simulated on non-sponsored results. SquiggleSR uses several sources of keywords, including RSS flows and search engines statistics (Zeitgeist, Yahoo! Buzz…). <br>
Motivated by the new controversial advertising system Phorm, we introduce a feature capable to deceive cookie tracking in the last version of SquiggleSR. This option simply simulates a full display of clicked results and thus downloads ads from advertising and web analyzing system (Double Click, Google analytics …). This option is only available with Firefox 3 and off by default because it consumes additional bandwidth and may open unwanted popup (notice that we are adding a bandwidth estimator). <br>
SquiggleSR new features and enhancements include:
• Enhanced graphics. <br>
• Better interface. <br>
• Support of Firefox 3 (including beta 5) <br>
• Improved log visualization <br>
• Support iso characters in queries <br>
• Unify the management of keywords sources <br> ( a tree is used instead of different lists)
• Allow weighted simulated profiles : user can give a weight to a topic, the number of queries generated that are related to this topic depend on the weight of the topic <br>
• Statistics (include bandwidth consumption) <br>
• User search parameter (number of results per page, the language,...) are used in simulated queries <br>
Next versions of SquiggleSR should include: <br>
• Simpler and more intuitive UI <br>
• Several configuration levels. <br>
• Adaptive queries and clicks scheduling <br>
• More statistics <br> <br>... read more

SquiggleSR is a privacy enforcement add-on for Firefox. More precisely, SquiggleSR protects search engine user’s privacy. Because search engines record all your queries and clicks, they have a lot of information used to establish search profiles. Although these profiles are useful to provide personalized services, they clearly represent a threat to your privacy.
SquiggleSR protects your privacy with minor effects on search personalization. Actually, we let users select about which topic false queries are generated. Moreover we simulate realistic queries. To do this, the keywords used in queries are extracted from RSS flows titles.
The last release of SquiggleSR will try to automatically download the list of your favorite RSS flows from your Google Reader account. If you don’t want to use this feature, or if you do not have a Google Reader account, you will use a default profile, however, you can easily manage it at any time.
In addition to the RSS flows, SquiggleSR uses popular keywords extracted from the search engine statistics web pages (Google Zeitgeist and Yahoo ! Buzz). Finally, you can also include your search alerts in SquiggleSR to simulate interest about particular queries.
SquiggleSR randomly click on query results to simulate real user’s behaviour and prevent artificial queries filtering. We take a special attention in avoiding clicking on AdWords to not disturb the economical model of search engines: « pay per click ». <br><br>... read more

SquiggleSR is a privacy enforcement add-on for Firefox. More precisely, SquiggleSR protects search engine users’ privacy. Because search engines record all your queries and clicks, they have a lot of information used to establish search profiles. Although these profiles are useful to provide personalized services, they clearly represent a threat to your privacy.
SquiggleSR protects your privacy with minor effects on search personalization. Actually, we let users select about which topic false queries are generated. Moreover we simulate realistic queries. To do this, the keywords used in queries are extracted from RSS flows titles. As you will see, this is quite effective and queries are realistic.
The last release of SquiggleSR will try to automatically download the list of your favourite RSS flows from your Google Reader account. If you don’t want to use this feature, or if you do not have a Google Reader account, you will use a default profile, however, you can easily manage it at any time.
In addition to the RSS flows, SquiggleSR uses popular keywords extracted from the search engine statistics web pages (Google Zeitgeist and Yahoo ! Buzz). Finally, you can also include your search alerts in SquiggleSR to simulate interest about particular queries.
SquiggleSR randomly click on query results to simulate real user’s behaviour and prevent artificial queries filtering. We take a special attention in avoiding clicking on AdWords to not disturb the economical model of search engines: « pay per click ».
The « incremental query » mode simulates unsatisfied queries before issuing a complete query for which results will be clicked. In next versions, we intend to simulate even more realistic behaviours.
The last version of SquiggleSR stores logs locally in XML format. These logs let you view the accuracy of simulated queries. For users utilizing the Web History service of Google, we’ll try to create a sort of « diff » function that will filter simulated queries to let you browse your real searches.
In order to present SquiggleSR more precisely, we’ve made a website describing SquiggleSR, allowing users to post comments and debate about privacy issues. This website is maintained in English and French : http://squigglesr.free.fr.

Hi,

SquiggleSR is retained in the sandbox of the Firefox add-on site since it has not been reviewed by Firefox users. The nomination process of Firefox requires having some user reviews. Any kind of user review will be appreciated: https://addons.mozilla.org/fr/firefox/reviews/add/5986

The name change so for those who already installed Fuzzy Search, you should remove it and install Squiggle SR instead.
New features for this week end I hope.