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Googlesharing Gets Revamp, Will Come to Chrome Soon

Posted on 11. Oct, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey in News, Tips

Googlesharing is a service that surfaced last January, offering users the ability to search without Google specifically knowing who they are. One of the most entertaining things about the Googlesharing site is how closely it mimics the Google motif, which is a clever move by its founder, programmer Moxie Marlinspike.

Last week, Googlesharing released a new version of its Firefox add-in that makes private your searches even through the Googlesharing servers that is must go through to use as a proxy. It does this by leveraging Google’s introduction of SSL searches that was launched in May. This way, there is no identifying information using the service even for Googlesharing’s server administrators other than a user’s IP address.

A Forbes article published last week pointed out that Google’s SSL search feature doesn’t actually block users from being identified for their specific searches; it only protects from third parties discovering that information. It’s no wonder then why Googlesharing has already amassed itself over 100,000 users according to the Forbes article. People who want to keep their queries private from Google are using this with Firefox.

So where’s the Chrome extension for Googlesharing? When I reached out to Marlinspike, he replied that it was on its way. “We’ll be porting this to other browsers once we have things feature complete on Firefox, which it’s looking like will be soon”.

Sounds good. Googlesharing is a useful tool that should be available in other major browsers soon, however I think that they may have some trouble getting an extension for Chrome accepted into the official extensions directory. We will see on that one.

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