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8.12.09

Don't be evil, but a little dense, maybe?

Look what the cat just brought in. Holy cow. Only miscreants and evil-doers fear Google tapping their into their privacy, but the Righteous have nothing to worry about. And it's all the governments fault, anyway.

But this doesn't come as a surprise, does it? Google is an information broker so how can they share anyones concern about information not being another good to sell. However, it's primarily information about people that they collect to drive their advertisement business. This is hardly neutral goods.

I'm wondering if with all this business background Google can still be the best resource when it comes to Internet research. Either the web complexity has grown to a point where they cannot come up with good search results any more or they weigh the results too much towards what their customers think you should be seeing, anyway I found it's becoming increasingly difficult to have good search results with Google. Too many hits are on proxy sites that just pretend to have the keywords you look for and instead reflect to some shady online shops claiming to sell "cold fusion energy cheap"?

2 comments:

  1. Hi Matze,

    recently i was wondering how the net looks when not seen through googles eyes. To answer that question i started to run my queries not only on google but also on bing (as i heard a lot of good stuff about it). In the beginning i was doing it manually but than a friend pointed me to the bing vs. google firefox extension which is a firefox search engine provider that runs a query on both engines in parallel presenting the results on a split screen.

    At least for my usecases the result is clear. The bing results are far worse. They are less up to date and less precise. Sometimes bing totally misses the point of my search (Altavista style results...).

    I would be happier if google wasn't so much better...

    https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/12661

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  2. Hi Frank,

    interesting add-on. I'm going to give it some testing but the first few queries seem to show that Bing is even more keen on serving pay-for content ;) At least I can say that its giving out totally different results than Google.

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