the more anonymous among us tend to opt for common IP addresses and common user agents to become the tree among the forest. adding a profile to that would, well, only add to a digital fingerprinting profile
> those preferences don't need to be attached to you, just your query
that's not how it works. preferences are by their nature personal. every transaction would have your interests and hobbies embedded, on top of metadata
> mit_cs_club, studioghiblifans_new, britains_best_baking_prefs, AlpineMountaineersIntl
you have voluntarily made yourself the birch among the ebony
> If you're especially paranoid you could even throw in a bunch of random preferences that don't affect your query but do throw off attempts to profile you
how would they not affect the query? they complement the query. or rather, unnecessarily accompany the query. your results depend on your input. it doesn't matter what colour glove you wear to pull the trigger if you bury the gun with the body
> write a script that salts every search with a few extra random preference lists, for privacy or just for fun
just the latter. fuzzing would be pointless since the engine will have already identified you by now
it sounds like an annoying browser extension at best. to label it a pro-privacy tool would be ludicrous
It would basically be like sending a search query in this form:
"Python importerror help --prefs={mit_cs_club, studioghiblifans_new, britains_best_baking_prefs, AlpineMountaineersIntl}"
If you like baking, anime, and mountaineering, it's probably convenient to leave all those active for your searches, even your purely programming-focused searches. But you could toggle some of them off if articles about "helping to protect imported mountain pythons" are interfering with your search results, or if you want to be more anonymous. If you're especially paranoid you could even throw in a bunch of random preferences that don't affect your query but do throw off attempts to profile you. You could pretty easily write a script that salts every search with a few extra random preference lists, for privacy or just for fun, and make that an additional feature. The tool doesn't need to maintain any history of your past activity to cater to your search, so I think it would be a good thing for privacy overall.