How to keep your Google searches anonymous and still use Google products

I don't know about other browsers, but in Firefox I do this ...

  1. Go to Preferences / Privacy
  2. Set "Use custom settings for history" and check "Accept cookies from sites" and clear "Accept third-party cookies"
  3. Click "Exceptions" and add "google.com" (plus any country-specific Google top-level domain you use ... for me it's google.hu) with a block status
  4. Add all the product domains/hostnames you use with an allow status.
    For me these are:
    • accounts.google.com
    • checkout.google.com
    • code.google.com
    • docs.google.com
    • drive.google.com
    • groups.google.com
    • mail.google.com
    • play.google.com
    • plus.google.com
    • productforums.google.com
    • video.google.com
With the above setup your browser will reject cookies from any Google site other than the ones you explicitly allowed. Of course if you use eg. Google Calendar (which resides at the https://www.google.com/calendar URL), you're screwed. I've not yet seen an extension for any browser that would allow you to control cookie handling based on URL expressions (eg. regular expressions). If you do know about one, please let me know! For now you can only control cookies based on domains/hostnames.

P.S.: there're extensions to prevent tracking by various service providers (Facebook, Google, various ad networks, etc.), but they're not very transparent ... meaning you don't really know what exactly they do.