Wikia search, the search engine of Jimmy Wales‘ company Wikia, is now online as an alpha version. Everything is very basic so far - no much functionality, content or eye-candy. It relies on user contributions and is supposed to be open and transparent.

Life scientists have a (new) tool to search for literature: GoPubMed. Many others have already reported about and I just found it via this posting (sometime I am quite resistant :)). The press release tells us:

This, the first semantic search engine, reduces search time by up to 90%. By sorting search results it enables scientists to answer biomedical questions in completely new way.

I played around a little bit and think it is really functional and fancy. Funnily “shot gun sequencing” in one of my papers leads to the key word “Firearms”. Recently Folksonomy 4 Science was included which “allows users to identify experts in the biomedical field and gain important information on recent research topics by viewing their networks.”

Happy new 2008 1984. Germany has now the data retention but this doesn’t mean that we cannot fight back. Via Roland’s delicious links I stumble across Anonymouse.org. This proxy lets you surf any page anonymously in a very easy solution if you don’t want to set up Tor or JAP. Only disadvantage is it’s low speed. For easy use have a look at the toolbar and/or Firefox search plug-in. If you want to use a Firefox keyword search (always handy!) enter

http://Anonymouse.org/cgi-bin/anon-redirect.cgi?sourceid=Mozilla-search&what=%s

into the Location field.

An alternative for the data collector Google could be the metasearch enginge Ixquick. According to their private policy they delete user specific information after maximum 48 hours. There are also different Firefox search plug-ins available. For the above mentioned keyword search use

http://ixquick.com/do/metasearch.pl?query=%s

Any other suggestions for keeping privacy when surfing?