Posted by Mike on Aug 17th, 2006
That’s what Jack Schofield suggests in his latest article, noting that Google provides the search results for America Online and that they track searches along with, depending upon what services you use, many more things.
And yes, he’s right, imagine having a GMail account, blogger, adSense and remaining signed in while you search. It’d be hard to imagine a way that anyone could gather more information about you than with that setup.
Still, I think it’ll be awhile before I’m ready to move away from Google, just as it took me awhile to move to Google from Yahoo! back in College.
And maybe it’s possible to get Google to change their ways? Protect users privacy not only by standing up to the government, but not accumulating information that would jeopardize it in the first place.
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Devin de Gruyl
August 17, 2006 at 9:29 am
At the moment, those looking for a viable alternative to Google have a few options. Altavista is still around from the pre-Google era of web spiders, as are Lycos and Infoseek (now go.com). (The last two are also corporate owned, however, and go.com is basically ABC on the Web.) Alltheweb.com is also a fairly good choice. I’ll mention Yahoo! as well, even though my own opinions about Yahoo! are pretty well unprintable.
The only problem is that few if any of these search engines are anywhere near the depth of Google, nor are they as good at finding relevant results. But using a combination of these tools you should do fairly well, if your goal is to replace an increasingly-spooky Google as your main source of finding info.
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Mike
August 17, 2006 at 11:39 am
Well, you could try either Ixquick or Clusty, like he suggested too ;)
And, seriously, Yahoo!? If I have to make a decision about some corporation knowing I search for “cute” way more than a normal person should and having a dissident executed because of a corporation turning over their e-mail, I’ll choose the former. I still don’t believe Google is evil yet, after all.
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Roland
August 19, 2006 at 6:22 am
If you’ve got nothing to hide, you’ve go tnothing to worry about. Bunch aparanoid whackos
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Corvus
August 22, 2006 at 11:13 pm
If you’ve got nothing to hide, you’ve go tnothing to worry about. Bunch aparanoid whackos
Ah yes, the familiar specious reasoning justifying invasion of privacy. You know, fascists like that reason a lot. It villifies privacy in favor of the collective. Even if you’ve got nothing to “hide”, privacy is still a right granted by the US Constitution — which, I might add, is a document you personally hold in high esteem. So, which is more important to you, the Constitution, or central control?
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