2006-02-11 18:02:21.863515+00 by Dan Lyke 7 comments
Diane pointed out some folks wanting to take a little action on Valentine's day to remind Google that dealing with China may not be profitable. I'm not sure that this'll be big enough to make a solid impact, but Google's search results have been faltering of late, and forcing myself to try out some Google alternatives for a day can't hurt.
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comments in ascending chronological order (reverse):
#Comment Re: made: 2006-02-11 18:13:47.361584+00 by: ziffle
I agree. They are now evil. What search engines can we use that are accurate but small enough not to be reporting every keystroke to the govmnt....
They now want to host all the email for private domain names - do the think people really want all of our email stored in googles data base for use by others? Surely they are joking!
#Comment Re: made: 2006-02-11 23:10:34.472523+00 by: ziffle
The more I think about it...
I went to the site Dianne showed us and broke up with google. Then I asked google for the term "google is evil" and got 25000 hits.
And then truth:
Ziffle
#Comment Re: made: 2006-02-11 23:22:04.267025+00 by: ziffle [edit history]
And I found:
clusty.com - much better and the data is nicely organized!
http://www.scroogle.org which uses google's data but skips the ads, and give you privacy!
a search for the term 'gmail sucks' on google gives zero results. the same search on clusty gives 350 hits...
#Comment Re: made: 2006-02-12 02:12:34.583125+00 by: spc476
I've come across the Google Watch site before, and it still comes across as mostly whining and sour grapes. Especially when he goes:
We need more regulation on the Internet. Specifically, we need laws that presume that opt-in for the citizen and consumer is preferable to opt-out. A good place to start would be to limit web crawling by changing robots.txt so that it becomes an opt-in protocol.
He comes across as someone who doesn't really understand how this stuff really works. Yes, what he wants is nice, but regulation isn't the way to go about it. And there's no way to keep the seach engines (or any other automated spider) out of a website.
My big beef with Google has been the poor selection of ads from AdSense. If they're spidering my site (which they are), then certainly the ads can be more targetted than they have been. Ah well.
Clusty.com seems like a very interesting engine though.
#Comment Re: made: 2006-02-12 16:37:59.808176+00 by: ziffle
spc: I hadn;t seen that - I agree with you here.
#Comment Re: made: 2006-02-13 00:41:25.934913+00 by: meuon
I've been using Clusty.com and Google both today. Without really analyzing it, but by feel, it Seems to produce better results than google at some things, and worse at others. I think it'll make a good alternative search engine for a while and see how it goes.
#Comment Re: made: 2006-02-13 04:05:19.594082+00 by: concept14
Given the state of corporate America, I never expected Google's "Do no evil" policy to outlast their IPO.