Google is moving into new territory: not only making arbitrary, editorial choices - really no different to Fox News, say, or any other media organization. It's now in the business of validating and manufacturing consent: not only reporting what people say, but how you should think.Gosh. That might partially explain the pH factor. To think there might be those who want to manipulate us.
I'm told I might do well to look into Scroogle and ixquick. I have no personal experience with either.
[Via Ron W]
5 comments:
http://www.cuil.com/
Here's another that I forgot to list that is supposed to be good on privacy. This was written by one of the google people that left google. Cuil, scroogle, and ix can all be installed in the browser. Here's a comment from my nephew that runs the computers for a major corp;
There are a bunch of search engines. For example, check out cuil. I still find stuff fastest with google. I think scroogle's main supposed advantage is as a privacy wrapper around google- If google is whitewashing results, I don't think scroogle will help find the missing content. I generally assume the main privacy vulnerability point here is not necessarily google, but your isp (also, when using the foreign site, which ix looks like, the data would probably get captured when passing over international lines). I also assume that even if they don't "tap" my actual raw voice or data connection that they have records they could do traffic analysis on, and if I were looking for patterns, I'd be looking for social interaction maps. I assume a lack of privacy when using the computer, using the phone or doing business (especially) with a card.
If this is what I think it is, I think you're misreading it.
Google is soon to unveil something which lets you customize your own search results. So let's say you search for oranges. You may get a link to a page where the subject is just a list of words. Usually these are advertising sites, and they spam their own site with keywords to get more searches. Alternatively, you could get something not at all related to oranges. You can click that as being not related, and block those sites from your future searches (for oranges or otherwise). If you don't like wikipedia, you can permanently block it from all future searches.
If enough people do this, that's indicative that the site really might not be relevant. Again, look at the spam sites I mentioned. Many sites are now "google-bombing" to basically hijack google into giving them free advertising. So if enough people mark it as bad, google figures 'hey, maybe this really is bad' and it moves down on the search results.
Reading the article, I don't think they're suggesting there's a secret cabal in google who adjusts hits up and down. It just ties into the functionality they've already previously announced.
I will admit, I'm very hesitant of anything which suggests google is intentionally messing with its results. The search engine business is very volatile. Just like google basically appeared overnight, so could google's successor. Even a RUMOR of google messing with results for political or personal reasons could send people clamoring to other sites, and that could take them down to where Yahoo and MSN are now. Google doesn't want that, it just doesn't make good business sense, and if they want to keep their market hold, they won't even consider going that way.
Haven't you noticed the little "X" remove box on google when signed into blogger? I haven't clicked it to know what happens but I found it interesting enough to note and ask myself "WTF?" especially when I saw this article.
Skewing results means less to me than tracking EVERYTHING and passing it on. I don't like liars or quislings. From their site, here is what I like about cuil;
"when you search with Cuil, we do not collect any personally identifiable information, period. We have no idea who sends queries: not by name, not by IP address, and not by cookie. Your search history is your business, not ours."
And its just as easy to use, see #2 on this page for how to use as default on your browser;
http://www.cuil.com/info/faqs/
Just make sure you go to scroogle.ORG and not *.com, like I did a few days ago when I tried typing in the url directly.
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