Party Vibe

There are no other search engines, Google is God.

Nah well there is Yahoo but that’s probably as bad as Google. There is also (off the top of me head):

AOL Search
Lycos
Ask
MSN
Altavista
AllTheWeb

I heard something about it as well, you got links?

Most of the useful engines store data in the way google does (it’s part of the searching algorithm, and is used to get relevant results – otherwise the quantity of total junk roaming in interwebland would overwhelm the much smaller quantity of useful stuff).

Don’t take all the stories you hear at face value – because while it is true google have a big database of user searches (which includes all sorts of info like which links you clicked, and how long you were there before you clicked another link from the search results), it is also true that so do Yahoo, MSN, Altavista, Ask, Metacrawler, and all the other web search engines…. Like I say, it’s part of the way they get relevant info for you when you search. TBH, the kind of data they collect in searches is pretty benign, and has probably also been collected when you logged on to this forum (your IP, browser type etc is usually logged in a forum DB, and gets retained in log files when flushed for however long an admin keeps them)…

And google are far less likely to give up that kind of data to any nosy group than MSN, or AOL – evidenced by their refusal to give up search data to the US DoJ last year (and they were the only major search company to do so – all the others all rolled over and asked for a belly rub…:hopeless:)

The recent hysteria all stems from a report done by Privacy International (who are usually worth listening to), but this seems to be one of the times they screwed up (the original report can be found here).

For the reasons why they screwed up, I will forego a rant and point you to some other people ranting :groucho:

First, read the report, then take a look at Matt Cutts blog on the subject (he’s a Google employee btw, and is really quite angry about it). Also have a look at the analysis on searchengineland. And a point of interest (taking point 1 on the google blacklist in the report) have a look at Googles log retention policy which gives the info the report claims to be unable to find…:you_crazy

But the real point remains the same – do you use the company that said “no” to the US government, or the ones that said yes?

And as a point of interest – Altavista is one of the big companies (founded from the DEC Palo Alto labs, and sold numerous times since 1995, it’s now owned by Yahoo… A potted history can be found here)

Should think so too…

:rant: :bored_yaw 😉

Basically a proxy that intercepts and burns the tracking cookie for you (you can do the same by using a proxy, and not allowing google to set cookies, or by deleting the cookie after you search)… (Anonymouse will give you a random ip address, effectively making you invisible, and you can get a proxy rotator addon for Firefox if you are really paranoid, so you have a constantly changing IP to any site you visit:crazy_diz)

If everyone does this though, google would become a fairly useless search engine after a few months (the tracking info is used for the site ratings of the search, so they can work out which of the sites contain information that users wanted, and which are just trying to sell stuff by having the collected world dictionary in their meta tags)…. Good if you have something against them, bad if you don’t want to go back to the old days of the web where searching for any info meant trawling endless numbers of useless links that had no relation to the search you entered….:crazy:

Seems a bit ridiculous in a virtual world that contains the likes of Myspace (owned by the Murdoch empire, and full of all sorts of personal info about it’s users) to be worrying about search engine logs. And if you still want to use the beast of Redmond, or AOL etc for your searches, get firefox and set it to ask you every time a cookie is set or updated – then use them….:laugh_at::laugh_at::laugh_at:Last time I did that on an MSN search, I counted 3 cookies from the search server, and another 5 third party cookies (from sites collecting “usage” information – ie all the stuff google are being accused of, but with the intent to sell the info to anyone who can use it….)

Sorry – off on a rant again….:rant::rant::rant:I’ll shut up now…:wink:

I hadn’t thought about that, but then again i still use Google and will do. They can collect info on my searches if it makes life easyer, well whats the worse they can do with it?

google is the best, but not really paranoid about the government finding out what i do, with the other 6 million in the world