On the effectiveness of anonymizing networks for web search privacy
Sai Teja Peddinti, Nitesh Saxena · 2011
Web search has emerged as one of the most important applications on the internet, with several search engines available to the users. There is a common practice among these search engines to log and analyse the user queries, which leads to serious privacy implications. One well known solution to search privacy involves issuing the queries via an anonymizing network, such as Tor, thereby hiding one's identity from the search engine. A fundamental problem with this solution, however, is that user queries are still obviously revealed to the search engine, although they are "mixed" among the queries issued by other users of the same anonymization service.