Many people are already aware of the amount of data Google can (and does) collect on them. Some people therefore refuse to use certain google applications altogether. Others just like them too much.

There are some services that won’t work with heavy ad blocking and anonymizing services - others will work just fine. A prime example everybody uses is Google search.

Google search will work just fine if you use anonymizers. Google Mail won’t.

Privoxy and TOR is a great combination for anonymizing, however you won’t want to use them for bandwidth-heavy web surfing, and there is little benefit of using them for web sites where you authenticate anyway.

Here’s a way to do a compromise:

  1. Install and configure Privoxy and TOR. Make sure they work.
  2. Setup a proxy.pac file (proxy autoconfiguration) for your browser like this: 
    function FindProxyForURL(url, host) {
 var google = /https?:\/\/([^/]*\.)?google\.[a-z]*($|\/)/;
 var tor = /https?:\/\/([^/]*)\.(exit|onion)($|\/)/;
 if (google.test(url)) {
     if (shExpMatch(url, "*.google.com/mail*")) {
         return "DIRECT";
     }
     return "PROXY 127.0.0.1:8118";
 }
 if (tor.test(url)) {
     return "PROXY 127.0.0.1:8118";
 }
 if (shExpMatch(host, "config.privoxy.org")) {
     return "PROXY 127.0.0.1:8118";
 }
 return "DIRECT";
}

    and point your browser to it.

  3. Add the following to your privoxy/user.action file: 
    { +client-header-filter{hide-tor-exit-notation} }
.exit
{ +filter{js-events} +crunch-all-cookies }
.google./(search|blogsearch|scholar|images)

    And don’t forget to reload privoxy.

You should now be able to access Google search with enhanced privacy (I can’t guarantee you they won’t be able to track you though!) while at the same time you can access your Gmail account at full speed.

When using Google Search (including image, blog and scholar search, feel free to add additional services) you should be seeing a login button, while you could be accessing Google Mail at the same time in another tab.

This list is of course not exhaustive. You might want to actually use privoxy and TOR by default, and only disable it for certain sites (or configure privoxy accordingly). You get the idea: this is just a very minimal approach to disable tracking exactly by the Google search site. It all depends on how serious you are about privacy and how important data throughput is for you.

Also it will allow you to access certain TOR functionality (such as hidden services) without running TOR all the time (after all, it is and will always be slower than direct access).

[Update: apparently some TOR exit nodes trigger a spam protection on Google, and without cookies you can’t solve the captcha. So the use of TOR doesn’t work well with Google. All the privoxy cookie blocking however is still recommended.]