Page 27 - June 2024 Newsletter

THE COMPUTER PAGE

As a hobby, I maintain several websites, mostly for local asso-
ciations. One of these is the Warwick and Leamington Beekeepers
Association. It was recently pointed out to me that, when people
searched through Google for “Warwick and Leamington Beekeep-
ers”, what they got was the following:

As very few local beekeepers read Japanese (that’s a fairly con-
fident guess), such a search result is of little use - although to be
fair, clicking on the Japanese text did take you to the right web
page!) I’ve investigated this and discovered a couple of security
issues with the site, which I’ve fixed. But what was most interest-
ing was that the Japanese link only appeared when you searched
using Google on the Chrome browser.
Now that is not the way I usually search on the Internet. Google
has a terrible reputation for collecting all kinds of data about its
users - selling this data is how it makes most of its money. It is
possible for a user to delete all this data, but the process is quite
complex. So I, like many thousands of Internet users, have
changed our search engines. I now use a system called Duck-
DuckGo, which guarantees NOT to collect any information at all
from its users.
It’s very easy to set your Internet browser to use DuckDuckGo.
Full instructions can be found at https://
www.howtogeek.com/709072/how-to-switch-to-duckduckgo-a-
private-search-engine/
Using DuckDuckGo to search for “Warwick and Leamington
Beekeepers” did NOT produce the Japanese link, but the expected
link. So - it’s more secure and doesn’t collect data about you.
What’s not to like?

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