"The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You"

I saw this guy's presentation on TED a day or two ago, and it was disturbing to say the least.

One small thing you can do is prevent Google Analytics form collecting data about your browsing habits. Whenever you visit a site that's using GA, your IP and other info are being collected by Google. You can read more about how to block GA from any of these sources.

If you feel that you must use Google to do your research, try using Google SSL, which provides enhanced privacy and security:

http://www.google.com/support/websearch/bin/answer.py?answer=173733&hl=en

You can also try a search engine called ixquick (be sure to use the https version), which doesn't record your search queries or IP and has a proxy feature in their search results that allows you to access each result through their proxies so that your ISP can't see what URLs you're visiting.

Getting back to Google's SERPs, you're right that there's a lot of junk to sort through. When I'm doing research for actual information (as opposed to keyword research), I've resorted to using quotation marks and query operators to get what I want. You mentioned that you don't want to see local results. In that case, you can use the negative keywords operator, which is a minus sign or hyphen.

Example:

^^ This tells Google to search for the phrase "auto repair" but to NOT include any results with the word "Denver." (This example assumes that Google tries to detect your location based on your IP, so just replace "denver" with whatever city you want.) You can also block certain sites from your results, like if you didn't want to see anything from Amazon or Wal-Mart, you could do this:

You can use a proxy to do your search, here's a good one:

http://hidemyass.com

Also try adding this plugin to your firefox browser:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/fir...le-ssl-search/

Google the word "scroogle" for more info on how scroogle works.