A fare that jumps in price the moment you come back to book it. Ads that follow you from a hotel search on one app to your social feed an hour later. For travellers, these aren't coincidences — they're features of how mainstream browsers and search engines profile you. Travel writer Christine Kaaloa, who has published independently for nearly two decades, argues it's time to move away from Google, and her reasoning is worth hearing out.
Her case rests on a few concrete developments. In 2024, Google's AI rollout gutted traffic to thousands of independent travel blogs, and its 2026 shift to AI-curated search made things worse — results now stitch together scraped content rather than surfacing first-hand human experience. In January 2026, Google integrated retail partners like Shopify, Etsy, Target and Walmart into its Gemini chatbot, using your account data to serve 'individualised offers'. Translation: what you see when you search 'affordable flights to Paris' is increasingly shaped by commercial partnerships and your own profile, not by the best answer.
Then there's pricing. In 2025, major US airlines were exposed for letting a booking-data company pass traveller itineraries and financial details to Customs and Border Protection; it stopped only after public backlash. In 2026, JetBlue briefly defended a $230 fare increase by suggesting the passenger browse in Incognito mode — later walked back as an 'error', but familiar to anyone who's watched a price climb while they hesitated. Surveillance pricing, which uses search history and behaviour to tailor what you pay, is already standard practice at retailers and booking platforms.
So what should you actually use? Kaaloa points out that privacy search engines like DuckDuckGo and Ecosia are a good start, but they're search engines, not browsers — the browser itself is what stores your history, extensions, device details and cross-platform permissions.
Her two standout picks: Tor and Brave. Tor routes traffic through multiple servers for near-total anonymity, making it ideal for price research, though it's slower and some sites block it. Brave is the everyday option — it blocks ads and trackers by default, asks permission before showing partner ads, offers both a standard private window and a Tor-powered one, and lets you wipe cookies and searches on exit. She tested it while planning a Las Vegas trip and saw little to no price inflation on repeat searches; one caveat — Alaska Airlines' site wouldn't load in the Tor-based window.
For travellers, this isn't abstract privacy politics. It's about seeing honest reviews instead of AI summaries, paying the same fare as everyone else, and keeping your itinerary out of data brokers' hands. A fifteen-minute switch of browser, plus a settings pass to disable history retention, gets you most of the way there — and supports the independent writers whose first-hand knowledge AI search increasingly buries.