Your guide to safe Internet searching & browsing

Yeap, you got that right "safe Internet searching"; a couple of weeks ago I was at my office searching for something using Google, then I got home and wrote the same terms in the search box to continue my search, when Google showed the results I found that the first result was in purple color meaning I have clicked it before, I looked at the upper right corner to find my name written there which means that I'm logged in to Google. So when you are logged on to Google it keeps track of all the terms you search for, that might be OK for some people but certainly not me, I find this bad to your privacy like smoking is bad to your health.

Imagine a huge archive that contains all what you ever searched for, it will reveal many sides of your character to whoever is having access to it specially people capable of profiling, maybe this kind of data is available for certain governmental institutions. You may or may not care about this but, many people really care about their privacy, specially when you are in a country that might try you in a military court or accuse you of  libel & slander of a public official or insulting a ruler entity when describing something that really happened to you...
Utilizing your Internet behavior, certain entities might start launching phishing or pharming attacks against you to further access your computer and your data.

So what can we do about it? Try to stay anonymous as much as you can:

1. Dedicate a browser for any Internet search activities.
2. Do not log on to sites such as Google, MSN & Yahoo when you want to search the Internet.
3. Delete all cookies before you open any site in this dedicated browser and delete all cookies & history after you finish.
4. Some people even use a virtual machine to access the Internet from it to decrease the attack surface of their machines/data, and if you are very paranoid like these guys you can take a snapshot of the virtual machine in a stable state after the installation and before browsing any site and restoring it to that specific snapshot after every time you access the Internet, while putting all data you gonna need again on a detachable USB drive connected only to this virtual machine when you need to write to it then copying all data somewhere else after making sure that all content are virus free.
5. Use anonymous proxies (e.g. tor which we discussed in an earlier post).