\section{Introduction\label{sec:intro}}

\subsection*{Background}
This project was delivered from Noroff Academy. A student could either choose to work in a group, or work independently. The topic for the project could either be chosen by professor and teacher at Noroff Academy, or the student could choose their own topic.


For this scope, the student chose to work independently with a self-chosen topic. The student has experienced that work may lose interest if there is nothing driving the curiosity behind the project. For that reason, the topic for this work is to find trends in \texttt{tracking\_hints} in web-queries. The student has a strong interest in networking, system administration, and Linux-based environments through personal projects and private experimentation. That is why this topic is chosen, to make use of personal skills in an academic work. Overall, the main work environment and method used in this project are thought in Noroff Academy. This aspect of the work creates motivation to complete the project, because the topic is of personal interest to the student.



As visualized in \autoref{fig:intro:01_thirdparty-domains}, which presents entries returning \texttt{tracking\_hints=yes}, Google was the only Search~Engine that consistently interacted with third-party domains. This finding is significant because Google also heavily used cookies on entries associated with \texttt{tracking\_hints}, as further discussed throughout this paper.




\subsection*{Hypothesis}

The student's hypothesis for this work is that DuckDuckGo and Brave will return fewer instances of \texttt{tracking\_hints} and cookies. On the other hand, the student expects Google and Bing to use cookies alongside \texttt{tracking\_hints}, as these Search~Engines are known for tracking user activity and providing personalised advertisements in the web browser.



\begin{figure}[H]
    \centering
    \includegraphics[
        width=0.95\linewidth,
    ]{figures/png/01_intro.png}
    \caption{Third-party domains across search engines}
    \label{fig:intro:01_thirdparty-domains}
\end{figure}










