Novel Dog

Here’s an issue that comes up all the time on Facebook and in my writer’s group. Question: How can I research online all the murder and mayhem I put in my stories without landing on some law-enforcement  watchlist?

I’ve done web searches on stuff that would curl your toes. If you write science fiction, mysteries, or thrillers, you need hard info on terrorist plots, hate groups, rogue states, weapons of mass destruction, end-of-the-world scenarios (and how to bring them about), not to mention blood spatter patterns, corpse decay rates, poisons and how to get them, explosives and how to get them, the sound of a Colt 1911, the kick of an AK-47, and how to whack someone with a bear trap or corn cob or whatever.

Luckily, I’m not just a writer. I’m also a privacy and free-speech advocate. I believe anyone on Earth should be free to use the internet anonymously, without being snooped on or persecuted by third parties.

Here are my favorite tools for searching and using the web safely:

Duckduckgo.com 

This is not an Asian fusion restaurant. This is a cool search engine… that’s NOT Google. Duckduckgo doesn’t keep logs, so searches you do there are not saved or stored. “We decided to make a bold move and not collect or share any of your personal information.” They describe their privacy policies in an outstanding tutorial here.

Startpage.com

But what if you really want to do a Google search? If you can’t let go of Google, try Startpage: “When you search with Startpage, we remove all identifying information from your query and submit it anonymously to Google ourselves. We get the results and return them to you in total privacy.” Startpage is my all time favorite search engine — not just because they piggyback on Google, but because of their amazing proxy feature.

Each search result on Startpage comes with a “Proxy” button. If you click it, the target website is accessed by Startpage’s web proxy, and the results are passed on to you. That means you can read the ATF’s website, for example, but the ATF never gets your IP address. They see Startpage as the visitor instead of you. Links on the proxied page are proxied as well (as long as they’re on the same domain), so you can surf all the ATF’s pages, and they will never know you were there.

I’ll also mention search.disconnect.me as the newest of my three favorites. It works like Startpage (without the awesome web proxy), but you can choose whether to piggyback on Google, Bing, or Yahoo.

Now you can unleash well-researched chaos in your fiction, without freaking out the authorities!  In my next post, I’ll show you Tor.